From the office of the Govenator:
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger today released the first report of California’s free digital textbook initiative – which outlines how high school math and science textbooks submitted under the first phase of the initiative measure up against the state’s rigorous academic content standards. Of the 16 free digital textbooks for high school math and science reviewed, ten meet at least 90 percent of California’s standards. Four meet 100 percent of standards, including the CK-12 Foundation’s CK-12 Single Variable Calculus, CK-12 Trigonometry, CK-12 Chemistry and Dr. H. Jerome Keisler’s Elementary Calculus: An Infinitesimal Approach.
You can find the whole story here
And CK-12 had the books ready for download at their site, where they call their concept of the openbook learning experience a “flexbook.” Flexbooks are books that can be compiled via the open source content the company has available. It’s an interesting concept, and one that has some serious potential.
I can remember the lawsuits that froze the use of the professor-compiled, spiral-bound anthologies (of such bad quality they often started to come apart after a week of class), only to have them reappear a semester later, after the suits were settled, at prices that could have put even the lawyers that argued the cases in serious debt, let alone poor college students. And that same pricing was applied to compiled e-textbooks at their inception. It’s one of the central reasons why those books have not been adopted.
In fact, I recently spoke to a representative for a major publisher who was baffled by the fact that no one adopts their “resource rich” electronic books. It’s simple. Piling resources onto a book that is already overpriced (because the copyright fees for each of its anthology selections has sent its costs soaring) to a degree that no one can afford it won’t entice broke college students to get their credit cards out. Nor will it encourage professors, most of whom think in part about the cost they are passing on to their students, to adopt these books. To make matters worse, some of these books contain work that is in the public domain (i.e. free).
With all the digital “custom textbooks” and “services” and “course packs” and whatever else is being added, it is nice to see a non-profit providing an open source option for state schools. I haven’t looked closely at the content, but if it’s current and high quality, open source flexbooks should be widely adopted.
