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Park City • Imagine slashing the cost of education materials while improving learning outcomes by making content available free of copyright protection.
More than 250 educators, advocates, publishers and tech entrepreneurs are meeting at Canyons resort for three days of brainstorming at the annual Open Education conference, organized by Brigham Young University professor David Wiley.
"Open educational resources" (OER) are materials liberated from paper and proprietary restraints by new technologies and are made available — often for free — in digital formats online. It's more of a movement than a market, and Wiley is one of its biggest champions. The idea is to cut out middlemen and it's catching on around the country, including Utah. State Superintendent Larry Shumway described plans to adopt open-source science and math textbooks at a fraction of the per-unit cost of traditional texts.
"We need open source to empower educators. You know what your students need, but a publishing company doesn't. They can make a great package, but when it's copyright protected you are forbidden from modifying it," said Wiley, who teaches in the department of Instructional Psychology and Technology at BYU and serves as associate director of its Center for the Improvement of Teacher Education and Schooling. "When I see something broken I don't want to wait to fix it."
Digital technology is rapidly changing how education is delivered, but intellectual-property concerns continue to hamper flexibility and access. When you buy a digital textbook, for example, you merely get a time-limited license to use it under terms spelled out in 30-page agreements.
"The money available to support innovation is going to digital rights management," Wiley said. "When all the money is being wasted on that kind of innovation, there is little left to support innovation to help learning."
He launched the conference seven years ago at Logan while a professor at Utah State University. This year saw the largest turnout, driven by institutions interested in cutting costs at a time of extreme financial pressure, Wiley said.
Keynote speakers included U.S. Undersecretary of Education Martha Kanter and Jim Shelton, assistant deputy secretary for innovation and improvement. They opened the conference Tuesday, highlighting the potential for OER to help the nation achieve President Obama's ambitious education attainment goals of increasing the number of college graduates by 10 million by 2020.
"This has to be about improving teaching and learning and it can't just be open and free," Shelton said. "We do the same old thing in a cheaper form, shame on us."
Where OER is already having an impact is in the $8 billion college textbook industry, according to entrepreneur Eric Frank.
Frank co-founded Flat World Knowledge a few years ago on a business model that addresses the frustrations associated with expensive textbooks. It acts as a traditional publishing house on the front end, contracting authors and designers to produce textbooks. But its distribution model is a radical departure.
First, assigning professors can edit and reorganize the books to tailor them to their classes. Students can read the books online for free, or pay to download them in a variety of formats, print them to paper, or order a traditional book.
"Where we are different is in the transfer of control," Frank said. "Students ought to be able to read in a way that best suits their learning and lifestyle."
So far, Flat World's 65 titles have been adopted for 3,000 courses and used by 270,000 students, who saved as much as $80 each per course.
"We are 3 percent of market share," Frank said. "That's actually success because we are building on that."