Category Archives: e-books

Free your mind – The push for cheaper textbooks

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As anyone who reads this blog knows, the cost of education is an important topic for us. One of our goals is to expand the number of education options for everyone in the entire world. Lots of people are trying to do similar things, especially those in the movement to have more open source educational material.

Textbooks, Senate, Cost of Education

Senators propose public funding for free textbook creation.

Those folks are getting some support from two US senators. Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois and Senator Al Franken of Minnesota have proposed a bill to offer public funding for the creation of education textbooks on the condition that the material then be offered free of charge.

Here’s what Senator Franken said about the bill.  “I’m proud to introduce this bill because it will help provide cheaper alternatives to traditional textbooks and keep more money in students’ pockets, where it belongs.” Here is what Al Franken said when he used to be an actor on Saturday Night Live. I bet he’s proud of that, too.

Textbook costs are more significant than one might think. The average student at a four year public university spends about $1200 per year on textbooks, according to the College Board. Since 1978, the cost of textbooks has risen 812%, according to this analysis from Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute. That is higher than the growth rate for healthcare, real estate, and general consumer prices.

The high costs translate into big business for education publishers as well as textbook renters and re-sellers. They are reluctant to cede that market to the open source movement. That does not mean they are not preparing. The three largest publishers, London-based Pearson, New York-based McGraw-Hill, and Boston-based HoughtonMifflin Harcourt, are all working on digital content strategies. Check out more about that in this great article by Michelle Davis at Education Week.

In terms of the Senate bill to fund textbook creation, I can see a potential problem. I am no hardcore capitalist or anything, but if the funding comes without regard to how often the textbooks are used, then the authors lose some incentive for making engaging, high quality content. They don’t need to be as competitive. That may or may not be a problem. Time will tell.

On the positive side, the increasing use of electronic formats for e-readers and laptops could reduce textbook costs further and expand the reach of free educational content. The benefits could easily overflow the borders of the US, helping students around the world.

At Rukuku, we’ve done our best to make content creation as painless as possible. Our Composer feature allows teachers to simply cut and paste text, graphics, and video into class worksheets.

The trend, regardless of whether this bill passes or not, is toward open resources. Composer can help teachers organize those free resources into class materials. Those materials can then be shared, or possibly even sold, on Rukuku’s Marketplace.

Multimedia Magic in Online Education

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One of the most common themes from conversations during our few days at the annual Educause conference was that professors and teachers would like more help putting together online classes. They often want to do the classes, and their schools almost always want them to, but difficulty exists in knowing where and how to start. For that reason, I want to include topics in our blog with advice about teaching classes and look in particular at ways in which Rukuku is equipped to help teachers through the process.

online education, multimedia

Teachers should take advantage of many media options to engage their students online.

The first of those topics relates to class materials. The world is full of exciting media resources and the range of possibilities expands daily. Professors and teachers in online environments can choose text, photos, illustrations, charts, tables, podcasts, other audio material, and video files, and they can create that content themselves or license it from other sources or even refer students to independent information sources on or offline. Teachers of online classes can take advantage of all these media to engage students, including those with less traditional learning styles.

At Rukuku, we make the process of creating and collecting materials for class very easy. Our Composer service allows teachers to cut and paste text and graphics or drag and drop files of any sort into a worksheet. In this way, a teacher can give a class lecture, offer background research, detail homework requirements, even suggest supplemental reading simply by creating a class worksheet. By incorporating existing materials, they may complete that process in minutes. Voila. Class preparation complete.

In our next post, we will discuss the essential element of personal, real-time interaction as well as the importance of prompt feedback.

The history (and future) of online education

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Infographics are a wonderful way to organize information in a useful and visually pleasing way.

Here’s one about the history of online education. Though slightly dated, the data allows us to pretty confidently extrapolate where this trend is going in the future.

Check back this later this weekend for more discussion of the hurdles faced by education, both traditional and online.

Solutions

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In the previous installment, I discussed a selection of hurdles faced by the education world in the viability, effectiveness and adoption of new technologies. Here at Rukuku, though, we’re optimists. To us, that doesn’t mean crossing our fingers and hoping everything turns out okay. Instead, we recognize that for every problem, there exists an array of intelligent, creative, and occasionally, downright awesome solutions. As it pertains to tech and learning, a few examples follow. Some are uncontroversial, others are mutually exclusive, and many are subject to lively, opinionated discussion based on one’s political or social viewpoint.

Policy solutions. In our political discourse, the primary rhetorical tools have recently become beating each other over the head with vapid talking points and just generally yelling at everything. That is quite unfortunate, because there is a serious, level-headed discussion to be had on the subject of technology and our (failing) education system. A sober discussion on the topic might go something like this. Those favoring robust federal involvement in our schools and universities may say that more funding is needed, technology should be introduced into resistant systems with incentives and pressure, the system should be made more efficient and equitable (perhaps through subsidies for disadvantaged students and locales), and accountability should be increased. Deficit hawks and decentralists might retort that the right solutions are to give localities and institutions more leeway, stop constraining them with one-size-fits-all federal standards, and diminish what they believe to be the entrenched, change-resistant behemoth of an educational bureaucracy that we have created over the last couple of decades.

Natural market processes and innovation. Whatever your views on policy happen to be, anyone who has taken an introductory Economics class probably knows that peaceful, lawful competition among innovative producers results in ever-improving products and services at ever-lower prices. If you are a child of the era when the personal computer was an exorbitantly expensive, fantastically slow, nauseatingly beige, boxy monstrosity, you know this very well. The computers of today are enormously better, faster, and more functional than their counterparts of ten or 15 years ago. Despite that, the average price of personal computer equipment fell an astounding ninety percent between 1998 and 2009. The introduction of the tech revolution into education will be no different. In the last post, we placed special emphasis on socioeconomic factors causing disparities in the quality of learning. To be sure, this problem exists, and is serious. But in the face of the unrelenting innovation machine, it’s also temporary. Technologies are very rapidly becoming more accessible and more equitable for people of all backgrounds. If the demand exists (and it sure does), the innovators will always respond. To end with a small but shameless plug: Rukuku strives to be among those innovators.

There are so many reasons to look forward to solving the educational problems of the modern age.

Who’s aboard?

Source for stats.

Technological problems in education

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While the rapid introduction of new technology into the world of education brings many obvious benefits, it’s worth noting that it creates a host of new problems. An overview of some of the most discussed issues follows.

Cost and socioeconomic disparity. As alluded to in the previous post, the cost of adopting new technologies can be prohibitively high, especially for economically disadvantaged students and locales. The ubiquitous iPad, for example, will set you back at least $500. The fear, then, is that technology could widen the socioeconomic education gap because the quality of education for students of affluent backgrounds, or those that attend cash-rich schools and universities, will skyrocket ahead, while that of their poorer counterparts languishes in mediocrity.

Resistance to the adoption of tech by educators. This problem stems from a very simple set of circumstances. Much of the faculty, both at schools and at universities, is not technologically savvy. The primary reason for this is pretty obvious: the only kind of Blackboard your 60-year old history professor knew when he was growing up was the kind that gave him chalk allergies and occasionally made dreadful screeching noises. Without ever having seen the benefits of new advances convincingly demonstrated, many educators either ignore or actively resist introducing technology into the classroom.

Red tape and institutional resistance. Resistance from bureaucracy is nothing new. Smaller and more autonomous institutions have had an easier time transitioning to new methods of learning; unfortunately, bringing change to a big public education system is like rolling a giant boulder up a hill. It shows: as late as 2010, over a third of US schools still did not have internet access.

Technology as a distraction. Many educators and schools are concerned that introducing iPads, computers, and internet access into the classroom will facilitate students’ knowledge of Farmville rather than science and math. It’s hard to argue with this one; anyone who has sat in the back of a college lecture hall knows that this is a valid concern. By the way, if this is an issue for you, check out our procrastination post.

Lack of research on the effectiveness of particular technologies. Because much of the technology we use in education is so new, there is no conclusive, thorough, peer-reviewed research on its effectiveness.

These concerns are legitimate and serious, and rightly invite robust discussion among stakeholders in education. However, here at Rukuku, we know a couple of things for sure. The problems are not insurmountable, and solving them will only reinforce a very exciting expectation: that technological advancement holds the promise for vast improvements in teaching and learning.

In the next installment, I’ll be discussing the various solutions to the problems outlined here, as well as the very exciting prospects for education in the near future.

[sources for this article: 1, 2, 3]

*Edit 02.03.12: fixed faulty link.