The spark behind this missive is that I was recently required to sit on a textbook committee as my department seeks to adopt a new American government textbook for our survey course. My first reply to the committee chair was, “I pick the free one,” but I quickly realized that that didn’t go nearly far enough. I currently use an OER textbook in my classes wherever I can, but they are still a scarce resource.
Where OER misses the mark
OER uses digital affordances to make the textbook cheaper without in many instances addressing the basic contradictions of thinking of books as the primary containers of information in our age. By doing this we also assign value to the effort of assembling ideas (whether they have intrinsic value or not) into containers and this, in turn, puts OER books in direct competition with much more profitable traditional textbooks. Money corrupts this process even further as authors (rightfully) expect to be paid and faculty are encouraged in various ways into forcing their captive audiences to buy books that are largely useless outside of the context of the class.
The basic textbook therefore largely derives its value from its curation function. However, even this curation function is often in conflict with the curation that every professor does when he or she sets up the material to be covered in a class and the order in which to cover it. Sometimes this role is usurped by a department or discipline, but the idea is the same. I have seen time and again how these curation efforts run up against the limitations of curation by textbook. Deconstructed textbooks or coursepacks are often the “solution,” but these “custom” products almost always increase the costs to students even further with little gain in the process. The system has made sure that this is not a solution to the problem.
Digital affordances supply a relatively simple solution to this problem but this is often totally missed in the textbook debate because that debate is about cost and not value. The value lies in the organization of material. The cost lies in the assemblage, transportation, and modification of freely available content.
Addressing the problem
The solution is to put that value in the hands of the practitioners, use digital means to distribute the cost drivers, and provide a level of modularity that a book format cannot do. Full-time faculty in a department or discipline should collectively design a framework or curriculum for a given course. (Again, this is already happening in many places alongside textbooks.) Individual members of a department could then be given responsibility for managing content within a module for the system. Modules are likely to be appropriate over multiple courses and disciplines and should be shareable. A platform like WordPress has templates that would facilitate this process. Now you have a curated framework for the adjuncts and a mechanism for providing content and keeping it refreshed (something textbooks routinely fail at) at zero cost to the student.
The amount of energy and resources spent on textbooks requires that we need to re-evaluate them in the context of the digital age. By pushing them to the background we also have the related benefit of putting content into its proper context for Digital Age students. It allows us to make sure it is the fuel for our students’ learning and not an expensive wet blanket that extinguishes their desire to learn. That will only happen when the content is as dynamic and empowered as their learning is (or should be). Basic textbooks stifle that and are a tremendous financial burden to boot. We can fix that if we take a sober look at their role in the digital age. We owe it to our students to do so.
Tom Haymes is a technologist, photographer, teacher, social scientist, project manager, and educational technology leader. He was design lead for Houston Community College’s West Houston Institute and is author of the forthcoming book Discovering Digital Humanity (ATBOSH Media). His website is ideaspaces.net and he tweets at @ideaspacesnet.
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