Digital Textbooks Call for New Business Models

by David Wiley
July 8, 2009

In the 1997 film adaptation of Carl Sagan’s Contact, S.R. Hadden teaches Ellie Arroway “the first rule of government spending: Why have one when you can have two for twice the price?”

When it comes to curriculum materials like textbooks, practice exercises, instructional videos, and online simulations, our universities ask students to pay for them again and again, year after year.

This made sense in the days before the advent of the Internet, when students had to compete for access to educational materials. In those days, if John was using the graphing calculator, Jen had to wait her turn; if Mary was using the physics textbook, Mark had to wait his turn. Students needed to purchase calculators and textbooks of their very own if they each wanted to have ready access to these resources.

Read the rest of the story on the Chronicle’s Wired Campus blog

Anyway, he brings up some excellent food for thought on how universities should to revisit how we think about openness.  Not only in the types of systems and software we employ, but in our academic materials.  He reminds us that the fundamental reason we are in higher education is to educate and share knowledge.  What difference does it make, really, if people can download our course materials?  Why shouldn’t they?  Because they haven’t yet paid for them?  Why is that important?  To get any kind of degree the will actually need to enroll, so I fail to see how that would affect the school’s bottom line.

MIT has for a number of years now offered most if not all of their course materials online for free.  Think of the savings to students in not needing to purchase books every semester.  What if the students did have access to all of the course work ahead of time, wouldn’t that just make it easier for them to complete the work and do better?  Perhaps they would get more out of the course if they were prepared and could be ready when the semester “clock is ticking?”

Here is the video clip of his presentation.  I’d love to hear what the university community thinks about this.

Cultural Agoraphobia: What Universities Need to Know About Our Bias Against Openness
In this presentation, Professor James Boyle will argue that we have a cognitive bias–he calls it cultural agoraphobia–that leads us to underestimate the potential of open networks, open culture and open productive processes. What is the evidence for such a bias?  What should a university do about it–from the library to the classroom to the archive? Using examples ranging from the development of the World Wide Web to Wikipedia and open source software, this talk will try and answer those questions.

Watch the webcast

“I’ve been thinking about this issue for over a decade. I’ve hired numerous people over the years and not one gained the skills they need from formal education. I’ve watched members of my staff get graduate degrees and listened to them express their complete frustration over how inadequate and inappropriate the curriculum was. I’ve taught graduate level classes and as an instructor, found the experience to be very frustrating.”

Being a web professional myself, I have also have experienced this first hand.  I graduated in 1998 at a time when the industry was just starting, so it wasn’t uncommon for web professionals to have little formal training. The sad thing is, that a decade later, there is still not an actual program of study dedicated to this field.  It typically gets relegated to either computer science, engineering, graphic design, journalism, or maybe communication studies.  Web professionals know that if you studied only one of those fields, you would not be able to hold your own in the web industry.

This fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be a web professional extends to the job market.  Often organizations devalue or simply do not comprehend web development.  Web professionals frequently find themselves under marketing or information technology both of which have different agendas.  Web development has evolved to the point, however, that it should to be its own department/unit/team, etc. that practices the integration of communication, design, and function required in this field. Organizations also need to understand that the Web is a vital piece of their business strategy and is a cost of doing business, not an afterthought and certainly not something to be handed off to non-professionals to manage (read: students).

In the classroom, web courses are often still based on techniques that are outdated and considered poor practice in among professionals.  In their defense, professors teaching the classes aren’t always provided the tools, budget, and time to keep up with current design practices. In the web world, conferences, blogs, and networking serve as surrogate degree granting programs for web professionals. Instructors need to be a part of that as well.

So back I come to the fundamental problem. Higher education does not “get” web design and development.

That said Leslie Jensen-Inman has some great ideas in her article on how higher education can change AND how web professionals can help.

From AListApart.com

Elevate Web Design at the University Level

By Leslie Jensen-Inman

Let’s face it. Technology moves fast; academia doesn’t. So how should educators teach web design and development—subjects that change constantly? How should educators prepare students for real-world expectations? How do educators stay up-to-date? And how do web professionals help educators to create graduates who fit in and actually know what they’re doing?

Right now, web education is out of date and fragmented. There are good people working hard to change this, but because of the structure of higher education, it will take time. So while sweeping change can’t happen today, let’s challenge ourselves to do what we can. Today, let’s begin to make positive, sustainable change to build a foundation for the future.

Define the problem

Many people casually, but often passionately, complain about the state of web education. I’ve heard these complaints at conferences, over dinner, and have read them online—especially when someone tries to hire a recent graduate as a web designer or developer.

About a year ago, I embarked on a journey to discover where we are in web education and where we need to go.

I interviewed thirty-two web design and development leaders. Each of them expressed interest in the formal education of the next generation of web professionals. Most emphasized a challenge common to higher education: technology moves too fast for curriculum to keep up with it.

As James Archer of Forty Agency stated,

The culture of large educational institutions has, in my experience, consistently proven itself unable to cope with the demands of such a varied and fast-moving industry. I know many good people are trying, but I’ve yet to see anyone come out of a university program knowing what they’d need to know in order for us to hire them.

Read the rest of the article on AListApart.com

The other article, Brighter Horizons for Web Education, talks about the curriculum problem and what the web industry is doing to help solve it.  This is an exciting development and I hope that WVU takes a serious look at this initiative.

The Web Standards Project and others have been working on curriculum frameworks to better educate budding web professionals.

from AListApart.com

in Brighter Horizons for Web Education

The WaSP Curriculum Framework

In our ongoing fight to establish wide adoption of standards in our profession, those of us involved in The Web Standards Project have begun trying to tackle the education issue. Industry experts and veteran educators on the WaSP Education Task Force are currently working to develop the WaSP Curriculum Framework (WCF), a modular curriculum that can be used to improve existing curricula or serve as the foundation for emerging programs. (Disclosure: I’m a member of The Web Standards Project, an educator, and the project lead of the WaSP Curriculum Framework.)

The WCF will be released in March of 2009 as a living curriculum that will adapt to changes in the industry so that schools using it can ensure their students are learning the concepts that are relevant to their field of study.

The WCF’s first release will contain approximately 14 courses divided into six learning tracks:

• Foundations
• Front-end Development
• Design
• Server-side Development
• User Science
• Professional Practice

Each course in the WCF will contain a list of learning competencies that students must master to pass the course, assignments with assessment rubrics to help educators consistently evaluate student progress, lists of recommended textbooks and readings, exam questions, and other relevant teaching and learning resources.

The WCF is designed to accommodate new courses, and certain elements of existing courses can be adapted to meet the needs of a particular school or region. The WCF will also include a template that helps educators create their own short lesson plans or “learning modules,” thus giving educators the freedom to tailor courses to their own teaching approach while staying true to the courses’ core learning competencies. Educators who have had success in the classroom with their learning modules can submit them to the WCF team for review and potential publication so that other educators can benefit. All the content in the WCF will be released under an open Creative Commons license.

In addition to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and accessibility courses, the WCF will also include courses that teach students the basic principles of design and usability, as well as how to speak about their work and how to work in teams. It will take some time for us to do justice to all facets of our craft, but it’s our hope that the initial courses released will teach the practices at the core of our industry.

Read the rest of the article on AListApart.com

The proposals in these articles are promising. I hope that these ideas get some traction.  What are your thoughts?

Related articles:

• Elevate Web Design at the University Level (Mark Greenfield)
• University Web Developers discussion of this topic on cuwebd.ning.com