O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference

Marriott Marquis, New York, NYFebruary 23, 2010

The Future of Digital Textbooks

Panelists

John Warren, Marketing Director, Publications,RAND Corporation (moderator)

Eric Frank, Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer, Flat World Knowledge

Neeru Khosla, Co-Founder and Executive Director, CK-12 Foundation

Frank Lyman, Executive Vice President,CourseSmart LLC

Nicholas Smith, Chief Operating Officer, Agile Mind

Outline

The Rise of Digital Textbooks

Flat World Knowledge

CK-12 Foundation

Course Smart

Agile Mind

Additional Business Models to Consider

Peering into the E-Textbook Future

Forces are Converging to Increase Use of Digital Textbooks and Online Learning

Growing movement by students, parents, and professors against high price and weight of traditional textbooks

Retirement of baby-boom teachers and full emergence of digital natives—younger teachers who have always grown up among computers and integrate them seamlessly into their lives—fueling use of digital textbooks and other digital content

“A Kindle in Every Backpack” policy paper recommends public funding for student e-book devices

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger launched an initiative in May 2009 to provide schools with free, open-source digital textbooks for high school students

President Obama announced an initiative to invest in creating online community college courses for job training programs, improvements in basic skills education, and free online education

Digital Content is Driving an Evolution in Learning and Communication

Lines are becoming blurred between online learning and digital textbooks, and between producers and consumers of content

Estimates for total digital revenue in the higher education market are less than $100 million, with e-book sales contributing ~5 percent; digital revenue in K–12 has been lower due to focus on core reading and mathematics standards, standardized testing, and budget crisis

Interactive learning on the Internet offers a mix of free and fee-based models, for public good and private profit

Trade-offs exist between open access and publisher controlled

Issues of access among different socioeconomic groups for digital textbooks—and e-book devices—may create a new digital divide

Self-assessment is one of the key factors that can be automated in digital texts and help students, professors, and authors

Trends Today and on the Horizon Are Driving Technology Adoptions

The Horizon Report 2010, published recently by the New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative, identified four trends as key drivers of technology adoptions for 2010 through 2015:

- Abundance: Volume of resources and relationships accessible on the Internet changes the role of educators in sense-making, coaching, and validating the credibility of information

- Just in Time Learning: People want and expect to be able to work, learn, and study at any time and wherever they want to do so

- In the Cloud: Technologies are increasingly cloud-based and IT support is becoming increasing decentralized

- Collaboration: Students output is increasingly collaborative, and there is more cross-campus collaboration between departments.

While this report focused on higher-education, these trends apply equally to K–12 and professional learners

Horizon Report Identified Six Emerging Technologies Impacting Teaching and Learning

Near term horizon (within next 12 months):

- Mobile computing: An increasing number of faculty and students are using mobile devices for collaboration and communication

- Open Content: Movement began over a decade ago reaching tipping point

Second adoption horizon (2-3 years out)

- Electronic books: Pilot programs are informing future devices- Simple Augmented Reality: Overlays of digital information onto the

physical world as well as code-generated 3-D models Far Term Horizon (4-5 years out)

- Gesture-Based Computing: Devices controlled by natural movements will go from games to teaching and learning

- Visual Data Analysis: Blending statistics, data mining, and visualization to understand complex concepts and relationships

“It is the author’s job to try to dislocate older media into postures that permit attention to the new. To this end, the artist must ever play and experiment with new means of arranging experience, even though the majority of his [sic] audience may prefer to remain fixed in their old perceptual attitudes.”—Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964

Flat World Knowledge Brings Open Content to Higher Education

Flat World Knowledge Offers an Innovative Model to Provide Digital Textbooks

Flat World Knowledge, a start-up company backed by over $11 million in venture capital, offers expert-authored and peer-reviewed textbooks, openly licensed, available free online and affordably offline

Business model is to provide content for textbook adoption that is as good as or better than current textbook, offer content for free, encourage purchase of add-on and convenience products

Students can buy a PDF download of book or chapter, ~$30 black and white printed version, ~$60 color print version

- PDF download includes print-your-own capability

Creative Commons (open source) license and tools to modify and remix encourage new derivatives and adaptation

Professors can create custom books, edit at sentence level, deliver unique books and print-on-demand versions to students

Thus Far, Flat World’s ModelSeems to Be Working

Adoption has increased from 1,000 students at ~30 schools in Spring 2009 to 40,000 students at ~470 schools in Fall 2009

Every chapter, every book, includes digital study guides such as flashcards, practice quizzes, audio guides

Approximately 65 percent of students make some kind of purchase, most ~$30

Incentives for authors include faster time to publication, ease of creating and updating texts, 20 percent royalty on any sale, royalties more consistent over time

Going forward, Flat World Knowledge plans to integrate more assessment

- Performance data will help professors teach and aggregated, anonymous performance data will help authors develop better texts

CK-12 Foundation Aims to Make Digital Textbooks More Accessible for K–12

CK-12 Flexbooks Aim to Make Digital Textbooks Affordable and Adaptable

Using an open-content, web-based, collaborative model termed the “FlexBook,” CK-12 offers tools to create, distribute, and customize high quality educational content

CK-12 provides access to free texts that are aligned to state standards with developmentally correct content

Educators can create customized digital text from existing texts, chapters, web pages under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license

Encourages collaborative learning via a community where authors, teachers, and students create, access, share, rate, recommend, and publish

Texts provided currently through a combination of author donations, licensing partnerships, incentives for community-based authorship, and university collaborations

CK-12 Has Been Successful in Meeting State Adoption Standards

Seven Flexbooks were submitted by CK-12 to the California Learning Resource Network for state textbook adoption in math and science, they all met the state’s academic content standards

- The seven CK-12 texts on average met 95% of the standards

- Four met 100% of the standards

- None of the CK-12 texts scored below 82%

- In comparison, a textbook from another major publisher scored below 50%, and the average by all non-CK-12 texts was only 68%

Slow adoption cycle means most of these texts unlikely to be utilized by schools until Fall 2010

CourseSmart Provides Digital Editions of the Most Popular College Textbooks

CourseSmart Provides Affordable College Textbooks in Digital Format

CourseSmart is a for-profit electronic textbook company founded in 2007 as a joint venture by five of the largest higher-education textbook publishers—Pearson, Cengage Learning, McGraw-Hill Education, John Wiley & Sons Inc., and Bedford Freeman Worth

- Also distributes electronic textbooks for other publishers

Offers more than 9,200 digital titles for over 1,000 courses across most academic disciplines

Benefits include lower prices for students (50% less than printed textbooks) as well as convenience for professors and students

Students chose between an online version available on any computer, download (partnering with VitalSource), and iPhone/iPod touch app

Student’s access to the book ends after a set period, usually the semester end, and students can not resell the textbook

Benefits of CourseSmart Texts Go Beyond the Printed Textbook

Allows instructors to review and compare textbooks as well as other course materials faster, cheaper, and with less environmental impact than print exam copies

Instant delivery allows students to wait until materials are actually needed for homework assignments and test preparation

Features include hyperlinked table of contents; search; copy and paste; ability for students to highlight text or add notes to texts

Electronic pages correspond exactly to pages in the paper textbook—allowing students and professors to stay in synch whether using print or digital texts

Some CourseSmart texts also include multimedia features, such as YouTube-style videos

Agile Mind Improves Student Achievement and Supports Exemplary Teaching Practices

Agile Mind Focuses on Excellence, Equity, and Sustainable School Capacity

Founded in 2001, Agile Mind uses technology to enhance equity and high achievement for adolescents in math and science

The Charles A. Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin helps the company develop research-based resources for a broad range of students and teachers—particularly those in underserved schools

Productivity tools, performance reports, and professional development services help foster exemplary, sustainable teaching practices

Participating students are showing large achievement gains

Agile Mind has served 2 million students and almost 20,000 educators in the past 5 years

High-Tech and High-Touch Tools and Strategies Deliver on the Promise of Blended Learning

Internet-delivered resources leverage the power of face-to-face seminars, mentoring, and other high-quality supports for educators

Internet-delivered services enable educators to have data they can use at a glance in real time to assess the performance of individual students and groups—relieving them of the burden of mechanical work

Students receive detailed data about their work in real time to enable them to responsibility for the success of their learning

Low cost model enables company to support aggressive R & D agenda, enables district and state entities to fund even in down economy

A Wide Variety of Business Models Are Emerging

“The best practices have to do with embracing innovation and being willing to take risks, and trying things that do not seem necessarily obvious—to break the bonds between necessary profitability and any action.” —Michael Jon Jensen, Director of Publishing Technologies, National Academy Press, in “Risky Business,” Book Business, April 2008

Connexions Offers a New Model for Rapidly Publishing Scholarly Content

Rice University’s Connexions offers free, open-licensed educational materials in fields such as music, electrical engineering and psychology

Presents scholarly content in modular, non-linear format

Encourages sharing and collaboration

Reduces the time to publication

Offers an alternative to expensive college textbooks

Currently offers content in 27 different languages, including Chinese, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Thai

As of January 2010 offers 15,831 reusable modules in 977 collections (up from 6989 modules in 393 collections in October 26, 2008)

Aplia is Developing Interactive Textbook Content with Auto-Graded Evaluation

Aplia (see www.aplia.com) is a for-profit company which offers an interactive learning solution to increase student effort and engagement

Founded in 2000 by economist and Stanford professor Paul Romer

Products supporting college-level courses have been used by more than 800,000 students at over 850 institutions

Subjects include accounting, business communication, developmental reading, economics, finance, and statistics

Interactive textbook content (note taking, highlighting) integrated with auto-graded questions in the same “assignment”

Currently developing assignable text with interactive, auto-graded questions built into the text itself

Safari Books Online is a Popular Resource for Technical Professionals

Safari Books Online capitalizes on the need for “just in time” learning

Founded by O’Reilly Media, Inc. and Pearson Technology Group in July 2001 to provide online content to IT, programming, and design professionals

Offers depth and breadth of technical content and is an essential resource in technical fields and among other professionals seeking to improve technical skills

“Rough Cuts” allows authors to publish their manuscript drafts, providing customers with access to pre-published information; reader feedback provides editors and authors with information to improve the manuscript

“Short Cuts” series of concise, digital-only reports sometimes become full-length titles when popularity and need are proven

Peering Into the E-Textbook Future

“Thinking of the problem as ‘how do we get a textbook onto an iPhone’ is framing it wrong. The challenge is how to make the best use of a medium that already shares three of our five senses—sight, speech, and hearing—along with geolocation, color video, and a nearly always on Web connection, to accomplish the ‘job’ of educating a student.” —Andrew Savikas, Vice President, Digital Initiatives, O’Reilly Media

Shopping List for the Ultimate Digital TextbookNonprofit group Project Tomorrow surveyed 281,000 students from

K–12 in all 50 U.S. states; offered ideas from students in grades 6–12 about desired features and functionality of digital textbooks:

Ability to personalize book with highlights and notes (63%) Self-assessment (62%) or self-paced tutorials (46%) Links to real-time data like NASA and Google Earth (52%) Tap into an online tutor whenever necessary (53%) Link to PowerPoints of lectures supporting content (55%) Explore concepts through games (57%) or animations and

simulations (55%) Access videos (51%), videoconferences (30%), podcasts from

subject experts (34%) Create own podcasts or videos to support learning (48%)

Features of the Future Electronic Textbook We’ll read it on a device that combines facets of the cell phone,

iPod, Kindle, Flip camera, and laptop, with a color touch screen and multimedia capabilities

- The recently announced iPad comes fairly close

Placing the cursor next to a term brings up its definition; clicking on a place-name deploys Google Earth

Maps, charts, and graphs, instead of static, depict the spread and flow over time while providing interactivity

Instead of a single picture for a particular item, site, or artifact, a gallery of photos is embedded in the e-text

Augmented reality shows models and concepts in 3-D

Users can instantly contribute comments, photos, and videos to the book’s gallery

The Future Electronic Textbook Facilitates Collaboration and Continuous Learning

Links lead to further scholarship or modules about topics of particular interest to the reader while encouraging comments and collaboration

Creative Commons license allows modules to be remixed and repurposed

Open video allows easier editing and remixing of video, audio, and text

Social web features promote distributed, ongoing conversations between authors, scholars, and readers

Deep Web semantic search unlocks additional in-depth, professional content, returning results customized to the reader’s interest that are not cluttered by irrelevant content

These capabilities are possible now, in one way or another, but have yet to be harnessed—how do we get there?

Challenges for Digital Textbooks Remain Significant

Open access business models are still largely unproven

- “Free texts” depend on success of “bundling”, print-on-demand print sales, enhanced products or services, and/or foundation, grant or endowment support

Interactive, participatory learning spaces using assessments, gaming and simulations, online tutors, and virtual reality environments are expensive to produce and maintain

Difficult to change the mindsets of educators who claim not having the time (or technical skills) to contribute

Keeping content contextualized to local, regional requirements as well as global curriculum standards

Early student reviews of the Kindle DX in education setting not very positive

“…Technology has advanced much more than our understanding of its present and potential uses. Social research on scholarly practices is essential to inform the design of tools, services, and platforms. Design decisions made today will determine whether the Internet of tomorrow enables imaginative new forms of scholarship and learning—or whether it simply reinforces today’s tasks, practices, laws, business models, and incentives.” —Christine L. Borgman, Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet, 2007

Forecasting the Future of Electronic Textbooks Digital exam copies will become predominant, increasing speed of

access, reducing manufacturing and shipping costs, reducing sales of exam copies to used book market, and enriching review process by improving the linking of texts to ancillary materials

As authors, publishers, and readers embrace new digital forms, greater opportunities for innovation and experimentation will ensue

Ability to repurpose digital content and spread costs over a range of projects allows authors, publishers, and producers to create content for niches and market segments infeasible with traditional publishing

As more books become scanned and digitized, links between digital documents will strengthen their usage and legitimization, making it ever easier to follow the bread crumbs of knowledge

Books will be cross-linked, clustered, indexed, annotated, remixed, and “mashed-up”—combined in new combinations with video, animations, and audio

Technical and Organizational Forces Must Be Aligned for Successful Digital Publishing

The Gilbane Group, an analyst and consulting firm focused on content technologies, identified key characteristics for success in developing digital products:

An alignment of technical efforts with business goals

Commitment to growth in digital products

Realistic expectations and focus on metrics

Leadership with a vision for digital product development and commitment to see it through

Investment in content management technology, often including web content management and digital asset management as a hub for internal and external distribution

Systemic and large-scale digitization efforts, often including encoding content in XML

Developing a Plan for Sustainability Is Critical Ithaka, a nonprofit group focused on the academic community,

identified similar success characteristics for sustainability of digital resources:

A dedicated and entrepreneurial leadership willing to test new ideas

Identification of a clear value proposition based on an understanding of users’ needs

Minimizing direct costs through outsourcing, partnerships, and other creative means

Development of diverse revenue sources and creative business models, including subscriptions, licensing to publishers and users, custom services, corporate sponsorships, author fees, endowments, and grants

Clear accountability and metrics for success

“The only iron law … is that digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws.” —Malcolm Gladwell, in “Priced to Sell,” review in the New Yorker of Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future of a Radical Price

Bibliography

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