Logo Rob Buckley – Freelance Journalist and Editor

As one door opens…

As one door opens…

Will 'open' close publishing?, asks Rob Buckley

Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | All 3 Pages

There’s a spectre haunting the technology and media world. Companies as powerful as Microsoft and Apple have seen it slash their margins and been forced to adapt. Those that couldn’t have been brought to their knees, or even bankrupted.

That spectre is ‘openness’, the willingness to give away intellectual property for free, and now it’s starting to hit educational publishing, too. The problem is ‘open educational resources’, or OERs, and already it’s clear there’ll be winners and losers.

OERs usually fall into one of two categories. In the case of things like MIT’s OpenCourseWare or the Open University’s OpenLearn, they can be resources – reading material, lecture notes, exams, or multimedia content – that other universities can use in their own courses, or which students can use for self-study. At the more sophisticated end of the market, though, they can be complete textbooks, available in their entirety online, that lecturers can recommend to students on their courses.

What both categories have in common is the fact the resources are free. What’s more, they’re almost always released under a ‘creative commons’ licence, allowing anyone who has the material to copy, share, modify or reuse it, provided they don’t do so for commercial gain. All this is clearly a threat to publishers. But there’s little obviously in it for the OERs’ producers, either. So why is it happening?

In part, it’s simply an altruistic response to the perceived high cost of materials. In the US, where OERs are gaining the biggest traction, textbooks are big business, with the market for new ones worth around $5.5 billion (£3.4 billion) and the second hand market worth around a third of that again. Academics have found themselves having to recommend books that can cost anything up to $200 each. In 2007 a US congressional advisory committee reported that the average student’s textbook expenditure “can easily approach $700 to $1,000”. All this has made free alternatives a very attractive prospect.

OERs can also have a number of benefits for higher education institutions, too, reckons the UK’s university technology consortium, JISC, which has teamed up with the Higher Education Academy to run a pilot OER programme. So far it’s found that OERs have the potential to increase student satisfaction, enhance the global academic reputation of the UK higher education system, and increase applications to UK courses from international and non-traditional learners. Good OERs can even promote individual lecturers, it found, by showcasing the quality of the courses on offer.

Leading the field here in Britain is the Open University, with its own OpenLearn and Apple’s iTunes U services. These have been incredibly popular, says Peter Scott, director of the Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute, and last year received 14 million visitors and 30 million downloads respectively. It’s also working as a marketing tool. “We’ve tried to track cookie sessions to see if people have gone on to register for courses,” says Scott, “and so far, there have been at least 6,000 registrations.” That’s more than 2% of the OU’s 250,000 students – hardly insignificant.

So the motivation for universities is potentially strong. But there are obvious losers in this brave free world, too. Some businesses, such as CrossKnowledge, have invested millions in creating content to sell to universities for use in their courses. And mature university OER providers ambitions’ can extend to more complex products such as textbooks and workbooks, impinging on more traditional publishers. Since October, for example, the OU has released 100 out-of-print textbooks a month through iTunes U (there are no plans to offer in-print books at present, says Scott).

As a result, says Nick Platts, chair of educational publisher Schofield & Sims, OERs are becoming a problem for the entire industry. After all, why would you buy a textbook when there’s one available for free? “They’re not good for a publisher,” says Platts. “It’s a bit like people writing a book and saying ‘I don’t want royalties on it’ and a publisher saying ‘I don’t want to be paid.’ It’s not great at all.”

Producing OER material does, of course, take time and money, even if it could save money in the long run. At the OU, Peter Scott says the creation of electronic OER material is now just a standard part of the university’s production workflow, so separate figures for OER costs are not available. But MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative is clearer about its costs, and has an annual budget of $3.7 million dollars.

Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | All 3 Pages

Interested in commissioning a similar article? Please contact me to discuss details. Alternatively, return to the main gallery or search for another article: