Education Week - July 10, 2013 - 21

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INDUSTRY & INNOVATION > Tracking business trends and emerging models in K-12
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Free Online Resources Forcing Publishers to Adjust
SCANNING THE OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES LANDSCAPE
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
place the often-divergent standards
used by individual states, which in
turn led to the production of different
sets of textbooks and other materials
in different markets.
But supporters of open educational
resources and members of
the commercial publishing industry
say they expect the two sectors
to coexist and produce classroom
materials for years to come—in
part, because of the wide range of
needs among educators for content
and for services that can help
them organize that content.
Some commercial publishers,
in fact, have launched their own
open resources or have bought and
incorporated those materials from
their original creators.
The advantage in doing so is
that “if you release things openly,
you have a much better chance
of getting a wide take-up—you
can get extremely rapid growth,”
said Victor Vuchic, a program officer
in education at the William
and Flora Hewlett Foundation,
in Menlo Park, Calif., which has
put some $140 million toward the
development of open educational
resources over the past 12 years.
(The foundation also helps support
Education Week’s coverage of
deeper learning.)
The market over the next few
years “will be a blend” of commercial
and open materials,
Mr. Vuchic predicted. “We want
healthy markets, but we also want
an open sector, and open resources
should be a significant factor.”
From Product to Process?
Many providers of commercial
academic materials see the rise of
open resources as a reflection of
both technology’s growing place
in schools and educators’ demands
for personalized products
that can be modified to meet the
demands of individual classrooms
and students.
That point was driven home in
a report released this year by the
Software and Information Industry
Association, a Washington-based
trade organization representing
providers of digital content, among
others products. There is less demand
for publishers to provide
a “complete and finished work,”
the authors said, and curriculum
is less likely to be regarded as a
“product” and more likely to be
seen as a “process,” one that “educators
continue to develop and refine
on an ongoing and iterative
basis.”
Many representatives of publishing
companies say they expect
commercial providers of academic
materials to adjust to open educational
resources by competing with
them in some circumstances, and
offering for-cost products and services
that are connected to those
materials in other situations.
Open educational resources “are
States
California, Utah, and
Washington, among others,
have taken steps meant
to allow open educational
resources to flourish.
Foundations
The William and Flora
Hewlett Foundation and
the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation are among
the philanthropies to back
OER.
Countries
Governments and other
entities in Brazil, Poland,
and South Africa have
backed efforts focused on
OER.
Other Groups
Organizations and
institutions like the
Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, Carnegie
Mellon University, the
CK-12 Foundation, Khan
Academy, and Curriki have
promoted or developed
OER in various forms.
n
JULY 10, 2013 www.edweek.org
n
21
experiences, while still evolving,
may offer a preview of how such
resources will be integrated into
classrooms in other parts of the
country.
The state has developed open
resources at various grade levels
in science, math, and English/language
arts, efforts supported with
state funding and money from the
Hewlett Foundation. Print textbooks
continue to be widely used,
and they are likely to coexist with
open materials for years to come,
said Tiffany Hall, the K-12 literacy
coordinator for the Utah education
department, who is helping oversee
the administration of those
materials in districts.
But state officials also believe
change is coming. Within five
years, Ms. Hall said, department
officials hope 80 percent of Utah
districts will be using open materials
as the primary source for at
least one subject.
SOURCE: Software and
Information Industry
Association
forcing publishers to take their
game up a level—and that’s not
a bad thing,” said Lee Wilson, the
past board president of the Association
of Educational Publishers, a
Haddon Heights, N.J.-based group
that is merging with the school division
of the Association of American
Publishers. “It’s a more vibrant
market.”
But Mr. Wilson echoed a view
held by many commercial providers
in taking issue with the notion
that open educational resources
are free. The costs of producing
those materials do not go away;
they’re simply transferred from
publishers to other entities, such as
foundations, universities, or states,
he said.
The academic materials provided
by commercial providers are often
of superior quality to open materials
because companies invest time
and money to get them right and
tailor them to educators’ needs,
added Mr. Wilson, who is the CEO
of Filament Games, a Madison,
Wisc.-based developer of learning
games. “We save teachers time,” he
said. While some open resources
can generate finished products
that clear that bar, he said many
would not.
Commercial providers are likely
to either join forces with open educational
providers, or focus on creating
for-cost products or services
that developers of free materials
cannot offer easily, said Barbara
Kurshan, a former director of Curriki,
a developer of open resources.
Those products and services
could include distribution or curation
of free materials, or the integration
of them across technology
platforms, said Ms. Kurshan, who
is now the executive director of
academic innovation at the University
of Pennsylvania’s graduate
school of education and trying
to help entrepreneurs understand
the needs of K-12 schools.
“Publishers shouldn’t be seeing
this as a threat,” Ms. Kurshan said,
but rather as “an opportunity to
engage the community in creating
and shaping curriculum.”
Some publishers have already
begun weaving open resources into
their work. One such company is
Pearson, which supports between
five and 10 open educational resources,
including libraries it curates,
repositories of information it
indexes, and resources that provide
access to open and other materials,
said Michael Chai, the chief digital
officer for Pearson Education
One such effort is Project Blue
Sky, a platform that allows users to
search through open postsecondary
materials, such as textbooks, videos,
and lesson plans, and integrate
them with Pearson’s proprietary
materials. The platform, which
uses a search engine provided by
the Silicon Valley company Gooru,
allows visitors to select a mix of
free and for-cost resources.
As open educational resources
have taken hold, Pearson officials
believe their company can serve
as a primary resource for teachers
who crave help navigating that
world, Mr. Chai said.
“We definitely hear customer
demand from teachers for us to
help them make sense of open
educational resources,” he said.
While some educators can do that
on their own, he said, “from what
we’ve seen, they will be a minority.”
Some commercial providers’
pairings with open resources
have been surprising. Last year,
Blackboard Inc., which had sued
companies for allegedly infringing
its technology patents, bought
two companies built on Moodle, a
free learning-management system
that had served as an alternative
to products from Washington-based
Blackboard. (See Education Week,
April 4, 2012.)
Open educational resources are licensed
through a variety of sources,
though one of the most widely used
is Creative Commons, a Mountain
View, Calif.-based nonprofit that
says it has issued some 400 million
licenses.
Many open materials are licensed
through agreements that allow
them to be repurposed. Some licenses
prohibit them from being
used for commercial purposes, while
some set other conditions on commercial
or other uses, said David
Wiley, an associate professor of instructional
psychology and technology
at Brigham Young University,
who has helped develop open materials
for K-12 schools.
State Movement
Major philanthropies also have invested
heavily in the development
of free, open-access materials. In addition
to the Hewlett Foundation’s
efforts, the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation has provided millions
in funding to grantees that have
created a range of open academic
resources. (The Gates Foundation
also helps support Education Week’s
coverage of the education industry
and K-12 innovation.)
And in recent years, at least five
states—California, New York, Texas,
Utah, Virginia, and Washington—
have taken steps to encourage or
support open educational resources,
according to the software association,
either by backing fledgling
projects to design those materials or
sponsoring full-blown development
of resources across subjects and
grades.
Utah has begun one of the nation’s
most ambitious efforts to make open
resources available in its schools. Its
Mix of Uses
The average secondary science
textbook, which is typically used
for about seven years in Utah, costs
$123. Schools can arrange to have
the state’s open educational materials
in that subject printed out at a
cost of no more than $7, estimates
Ms. Hall.
Yet for many schools, the benefits
of open resources are not financial,
Ms. Hall said. Students can take
those materials, or sections of them,
home easily. They can take notes
and write questions on them without
getting into trouble.
Travis Lemon’s classroom offers
an example of how Utah educators
are blending both kinds of resources.
Mr. Lemon, a math teacher at
American Fork Junior High School,
south of Salt Lake City, worked on
a team that helped design open
resources in that subject. Today,
he uses the state’s open resources
to guide his 9th graders through
“mathematical tasks,” core daily lessons.
He said he still turns back to
materials produced by commercial
publishers, mostly to give students
extra practice and increase their
“procedural fluency.”
Open resources give teachers
more power—and more responsibility,
Mr. Lemon said. Teachers are
obligated to vet open materials and
figure out whether they make sense
for lessons, rather than relying on
textbooks for guidance, he said.
States and districts would be wise,
he said, to back professional development
to help them figure that out.
“It’s going to require an investment
in teachers, rather than textbooks,
on the part of our policymakers,”
Mr. Lemon said.
Coverage of entrepreneurship and
innovation in education and school
design is supported in part by a grant
from the Carnegie Corporation
of New York. Education Week retains
sole editorial control over the content
of this coverage.
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