As Free Textbooks Go Mainstream, Advocate Says Colleges Should Do More to Support Them

It’s been a big few weeks for the movement to replace commercial textbooks with free online materials, thanks to the sudden rise of something called the Zero Textbook Cost degree.

In June, 38 community colleges announced plans to make free online materials standard in every course in some degree programs as part of a new effort coordinated by Achieving the Dream. Just a few weeks later, Gov. Jerry Brown of California, a Democrat, signed a 2016-17 budget that includes $5 million for community colleges in the state to create their own ZTC degrees.

Hal Plotkin, a longtime advocate of open education resources, or OER, says the moves could eventually save students billions of dollars. As he argued in a recent commentary, California’s new ZTC program is “easily the most ambitious state-level effort to promote the use of OER in public higher education to date.”

Yet while cheering both the California and Achieving the Dream initiatives, Mr. Plotkin, a senior open-policy fellow at Creative Commons USA, argues that college leaders could and should be doing far more to promote the use of free, openly licensed materials, to prevent publishers from treating students “like walking cash registers.”

Mr. Plotkin, who was a senior policy adviser to the under secretary of the U.S. Department of Education from 2009 to 2014, also says administrators, deans, and presidents need to better support professors who are interested in using such materials.

And he says they should focus some of their fund-raising prowess on open academic projects. Thousands and thousands of college fund raisers are “running around selling naming opportunities for sports stadiums,” he says. “I’m not aware of a single one who’s out there selling a naming opportunity to an open physics collection.”

The Chronicle spoke recently with Mr. Plotkin about the challenges he sees for the open-educational-resources movement. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. You have an interesting perspective on this because you’re not inside the academy, but you look at it structurally. As you look at the landscape, are there two or three things that really need to happen next to push this Zero Textbook Cost movement to the next level?

A. Yes. I think that No. 1, we need to do a better job of lifting up and honoring the academics who are leading this crusade for open educational resources and for accountability through transparency.

I think that there’s enormous room for college administrators, deans, and presidents around the country to provide support to these faculty members. These are heroes, and we need to make it clear that we respect and honor the contributions that they’re making to our colleges and to our communities. There’s maybe only a half dozen colleges in the country right now that are making any efforts to recognize the faculty members who are doing this work.

The other thing we really need to do is to involve the existing college philanthropic arms in supporting the creation and continuous improvement of open educational resources.

Q. What do you mean by that?

A. We have thousands and thousands of college development officers in this country running around selling naming opportunities for sports stadiums, spas, my goodness, even athletic bathrooms. And yet I’m not aware of a single one who’s out there selling a naming opportunity to an open physics collection, or an open collection that would help students become college-ready in English or math.

There’s a huge opportunity here for college philanthropic enterprises that already raise money for colleges and universities to shift their focus from trying to raise money to build athletic facilities and instead try to raise money to build open academic facilities. Wouldn’t that be a marvelous development?

Q. You mention the need to raise up and promote the faculty members and others who are promoting open resources. You still find a lot of reluctance among professors to use these resources, in many cases because using an open resource can often be harder than using a textbook because the process involves a little more cutting and pasting and choosing. Do you see any way to get faculty members more engaged on this?

A. Yes, indeed. One of the things we’ve discovered when we survey faculty attitudes about open educational resources is that roughly half of the faculty surveyed indicate that they are interested in either using or creating or improving open educational resources, and they report that the biggest obstacle that they have is a lack of support from their administrative infrastructures, and a lack of time.

One of the things that we’ve been emphasizing is how important it is to provide appropriate support to faculty members who are inclined to use open educational resources. I’ve never been interested in trying to convince a faculty member to use open educational resources if their preference is not to do so.

As for the ease of use of open educational resources, well, they were much harder to use 10 or 15 years ago, when the pioneers in this movement got started, but now there are so many curated, cultivated, quality-controlled, peer-reviewed, excellent, high-quality academic resources for higher education and postsecondary and job training that the amount of effort that’s required is a substantial fraction of what used to be required, and it’s approaching what’s involved in selecting and reviewing conventional learning materials.

Q. As this ecosystem evolves and there are more open resources, what role do you see for the publishers in this? I mean, they’ve been making millions and millions of dollars in investment not just in content but in technologies. Where do traditional publishers fit into this mix?

A. While I’m concerned about what happens to publishers, I recognize that we live in an age where the internet is changing the architecture of many industries, and I think that it’s the responsibility of public-policy makers to determine what’s the best use of scarce public resources to provide the highest-quality education for the greatest number of our fellow citizens, and concerns about whether business models that were developed for the publishers decades ago are threatened is not something I spend a lot of time focused on.

My advice to the publishers would be to look for areas where they can add value, and meet the public need for more high-quality education at lower costs.

Often what looks like lower prices for online texts is actually something that leaves many students with a worse deal than they had before, because in the old days a student could buy a textbook and at least they would have the textbook. At the end of the course, they could either keep the textbook or sell the textbook to a classmate and get some value for it.

Now the publishers have moved instead to these online models with time-expiring passwords, which are in many ways much worse for students. If a student gets ill and has to repeat the course, they often have to buy the password all over again. At the end of the course, they have nothing they can keep. Most people who buy online access to books on Amazon, for pleasure reading, get a better deal than students get when they’re using some of these supposedly more advanced publisher alternatives.

We simply have to use public policy to make sure that students are not being treated like walking cash registers by publishers who are trying to ring those cash registers at every available opportunity. We also have this compelling evidence now that when teachers use open educational resources, they are themselves reporting higher levels of job satisfaction, and we’re seeing student performance and student retention increase in many cases.

We have a rare situation in a policy now where it’s possible for us to spend less money on something and to get better outcomes. I think publishers ought to respond to that reality by seeing what they can do to accelerate the transition to the use of open educational resources, and to become partners in deploying the most effective, cost-efficient methods of teaching and learning, rather than being primarily preoccupied, as they perhaps necessarily are, with protecting profit margins that are tied to an antiquated business model that no longer serves public interests.

Q. What role do you see for government in all this?

A. The government has to step back into its traditional role of being a protector of public assets. Government technology policy, for most of my life, has been primarily about how do we enable a handful of entrepreneurs and investors to get very, very rich.

It’s all been about promoting entrepreneurship, which is of course a valuable American activity, but we need another aspect of technology policy on government, which is about something more than just making sure that this country is a safe place for an entrepreneur to become a billionaire.

Q. What does that look like, exactly?

A. We need an aspect of technology policy that looks at the question of “How can we use technology to more efficiently deliver public services?” That’s something that I think the Obama administration has been the first presidential administration to take on in a direct way, through its policies promoting open educational resources, open licenses, and open data. That’s a very different approach on technology policy.

Goldie Blumenstyk writes about the intersection of business and higher education. Check out www.goldieblumenstyk.com for information on her new book about the higher-education crisis; follow her on Twitter @GoldieStandard; or email her at goldie@chronicle.com.

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