Open courseware gains momentum

“While the up-front hardware cost of providing a Kindle-like device to every child would necessitate a high front-end investment, costs for eTextbooks themselves would quickly produce a savings compared with print textbooks,” Freedman wrote. “If we create savings in one category, the funds can be reassigned to others, like improving teacher pay.”

Neeru Khosla, one of the founders of the California-based CK-12 Foundation, which provides free online digital textbooks along with additional tools to help students conceptualize information, said she has tried to determine a concrete amount that schools save by using her textbooks.

“There are no concrete numbers, because it’s a very hard thing to calculate right now. But even without the cost benefits, there are many other benefits that you get. You can put on one page your English content that you are trying to teach, and right on the next page could be the language of that child, so they could at least not be hurt by and held back by not knowing English,” she said. “How do you calculate the cost savings of that benefit?”

DeLaina Tonks, director of the Open High School of Utah, said she has seen this type of non-monetary benefit in the first few months that the school has been open. Open High School is a virtual public charter school that has committed to the exclusive use of open educational resources throughout its curriculum.

“[Some students] came to Open High School because they thought it would be easy and they thought it would be flexible, and what they found is that we have a definite school culture,” said Tonks, the school’s director. “We’ve tried to replicate the high school setting in a virtual arena.”

One parent of an Open High School student said she had seen vast improvement in the first few months of her son’s ninth-grade year.

“Nathan is thriving in his school at Open High. [It] didn’t take more than a day to get used to this new way of learning. He’s getting A’s! He is motivated and loves the work he’s given daily,” wrote Kelley Broadbent in an eMail message to eSchool News. “The … approach is a refreshing blend of very interesting topics, thoughtful discussions, ‘out-of-the-box’ learning approaches, zero busywork, challenging and memorable/useful assignments to complete daily, and low-stress ‘exams’ with a very flexible timeline.”

The school opened with 125 ninth graders, and each year Open High School plans to add a grade, enrolling up to 1,500 students. Tonks said the school is continuing to gather content, building its core curriculum over the first four years, followed by Advanced Placement and other elective classes. Open High School teachers are involved with developing curriculum and are compensated for it, something that Tonks said makes it hard to realize the savings the school hopes to see from using open courseware.

“What we’re looking at is 10 years down the road, when we’ve built a core curriculum. … As we go on and each year we build more courses and our variety of courses we have to offer becomes larger, then we aren’t going to have to pay for that instructional designer and those teachers to build the courses anymore, that will ramp down in scale,” she said. “And at that point we will be able to realize some of the savings, and I don’t have a good feel for how long that’s going to take.”

But National Association of College Stores spokesman Charles Schmidt said many times educational institutions forget about other costs that come with providing open courseware.

“Utilization of open-access course materials … as [an] affordability initiative should fully account for all direct and indirect costs and should take into consideration any potential reduction of revenue that might otherwise be used by an institution to fund financial aid, student life activities, or other necessary campus functions,” he wrote in an eMail message to eSchool News.

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