5.1 Wikieducator: memoirs, myths, misrepresentations and the magic  (Page 16/21)

In single-mode distance education institutions - there is a strong value proposition. About 80% of the costs of producing DE materials is academic authoring time. So it makes economic sense to share.

There are a number of countries in the Commonwealth where authors are commissioned to develop school textbooks - unfortunately under closed copyright. I have no problems whatsoever in ministerial funding of free content development. This is a classic win-win scenario. Authors earn a living and can pay their bills. The ministry still gets the textbooks and over the medium term costs will be reduced through mass collaboration. The use of a free content license provides the freedom for local adaptations. Revisions are easier and content can be updated more frequently. There are also examples of nationally funded projects to develop online support materials for learners in identified subject areas. Again - these examples are under all rights reserved. This coming year - I’m hoping to find one or more Education ministries that will invest in a free-text book and/or development of free content web resources as a pilot so we can evaluate and build the costing models using this approach. We must find hard evidence of the value proposition.

Just thinking aloud here - you know all this stuff.

Cheers

11. ken udas - april 9th, 2007 at 6:53 am

Sorry for dropping out of sight for a few days. There is some great dialog going on here. I would like to follow-up on one of two points in the discussion. Although minor points, I think that they are relevant. I hope that this serves to summarize some of the dialog while also iterating some of the questions.

I do think that there is some motivation for individual faculty members and institutions to create and to use OERs, under certain circumstances in place of traditional textbooks. Some examples include:

• When there are niche local needs such as language requirements, need for specific types of examples in particular content areas, traditional textbooks are banned or censored by governments and/or school administrations, etc.
• It is not economically feasible to use traditional textbooks.
• The content in the course is very dynamic and traditional publishing operations and licensing agreements are not adequate for purposes of relevance.
• Etc.

These might all be reasons to suggest that engagement by individual faculty members and institutions potentially extend beyond “marketing” efforts. In Slovakia, for example, there was a process through which we published “course notes” and made them available to students and other faculty with no explicit restrictions. The course notes were a combination of a syllabus, instructions for using the notes, assignments, assessment criteria, examinations, and content. They were in essence annotated textbooks designed to meet the localization and economic needs of a university operating in a developing economy. There were no formal mechanisms in place at the time to distribute the content beyond Comenius University, so the usefulness of the content was sub-optimized.