Campus Technology has a long interview with the head of Indian University’s e-text program. Lots in interesting stuff in the article. Here’s the beginning:
Nik Osborne, leader of the Indiana University (IU) eTexts initiative and chief of staff for the Office of the Vice President for IT, could be considered an “old-timer” when it comes to the implementation of digital textbook programs. After all, his institution’s implementation of e-texts has been going on since 2009.
Now five other universities will also be running pilots based on the model developed by IU through a program set up by Internet2’s NET+ service. Participating universities in will get McGraw-Hill e-texts, the Courseload reader and annotation platform integrated with their learning management system, and the opportunity to be part of a joint research study of e-text use and perceptions.
In that model, the institution negotiates a deep discount off the list price of the textbook in order to have access to an e-text edition. In return for the discount, the university guarantees that every single student in the course will buy the e-text, which is charged like a lab fee. This is a definite change from the current textbook model, in which each student is personally responsible for showing up to class armed with the textbook, either in printed or digital form. As schools are discovering, as the prices of printed textbooks rise, so does the number of students who avoid buying the textbook.
But IU isn’t done tweaking its approach to managing e-texts. In this interview, Osborne explains why digital textbooks offer so many advantages over printed ones and why the current “course fee model,” as he calls it, isn’t the final word for disrupting the traditional textbook model.
Thanks to Michael von Glahn for the link.
It still looks like lipstick on a pig. Textbooks are written by institution of higher education employees (professors, lecturers, etc.) moonlighting for commercial publishers who offer those texts at exorbitant prices. Professors assign those books to students, base exams on them and make them as indispensable as possible — captive consumers.
This is action research dedicated to perpetuating this cabal where students continue to pay more than they should have to and get less for their money.
I would rather see institutions of higher education take up the challenge of making college eTextbooks better and cheaper if not free and for the foreseeable future, not just for the short duration of a pilot program. They command all the means of eTextbook production and they all say that they have a keen interest in helping students reach their full potentials.
Institutions of higher education should take up the business of creating and disseminating eTextbooks dis-intermediating commercial textbook publishers in the process.