Thanks Delmar for bringing in this meaty topic. One might say it’s a sign of Open’s success (hardly guaranteed) that a for profit publisher wants to go toe to toe with. I’m sure you have some counter arguments for their FlatWorld vs LibreTexts provocation.
I do. The numbers and comparisons were screwy and, at least in the LibreTexts comparison, weren’t comparing apples to apples. I presume the same is true for the other comparisons. If people think it is worth our time to respond, I’m happy to do so. Personally, I didn’t think they deserved a response, although the idea of doing a proper comparison may be worthwhile for general marketing purposes; we do such internal comparison this all the time in our internal discussions.
But is it something one want so get into the price game with? Is there not more that comes with a fully open ethos than cost? At the same time, does it not suggest that the ecosystem of services you describe more than the content come with costs?
Oh yeah. Cost (money) is the name of the game. We can talk about ethos, ethics, philosophy, values, equity, and doing the “right thing” all day long, but I’m not convinced those things, by themselves, drive large-scale change. In fact, I’m struggling to think of a major, large-scale implementation where ethics or philosophy actually trumped economics. At some point, the numbers win. That doesn’t mean ethos and ethics are irrelevant; they tell us what we should do and why. But if we want something to actually scale, survive institutional resistance, and become the default rather than the exception, we have to make the economic case.
For OER, I think this is particularly important. “Open is better” is not a sufficient value proposition. Open has to be better and cheaper or so much more economically compelling that the ethical argument becomes almost unnecessary. If we can make the open alternative the financially rational choice, then we don’t have to convince everyone to become an idealist. We just have to give them a better deal – this is the “game” I am referring to in my post and comments.
The principal impact I think we have is the number of adoptions, which is a metric that scales directly with money saved and content used. Ignoring money is therefore a big mistake (and if one does, then one ignores sustainability). If we want OER to scale, we need to recognize that cost is one of the primary drivers of adoption. Ethics and philosophy matter, but economic impact is what ultimately allows us to reach scale.
And how do we pull what are really distinct entities and interests together to develop not a platform but an ecosystem? Much to ponder, let’s see what others have to say.
Ah… that is a good question. I have been posting about the need, but not really the how. I have ideas about this, but it takes more space to explain than a quick response allows. As I mentioned before, I envision a federated approach operating within a single-source publishing model. Flat federated models tend not to work or require too much coordination and effort. E.g., MoodleNet, which collapsed a few months ago, is a good example: it had a great vision that I liked, but the model ultimately proved difficult to sustain. I’ll draft up my ideas for building this ecosystem after next week’s OEG meeting.
One has to acknowledge on a surface glance they look slick. Who has any familiarity with FlatWorld in real use?
Depends on the question. If you’re asking whether their original OER content is still being used, the answer is yes; it is all over the place. We (LibreTexts) have fully harvested their OER books years ago and have been slowly updating them to reflect more modern sensibilities like accessibility.
If you’re asking what percentage of the market they have, I don’t know. But FlatWorld is a mature company now and I presume the venture capital has largely burned out. They’re probably operating in the black at this point, i.e., faculty are adopting their resources and students are paying them. Certainly not at the scale of the Big Three publishers, but they appear to have carved out a viable market.
And I cannot help but remembering their original genesis in 2007 as Flat World Knowledge as originally disrupting as free open textbooks in a model that doid not pan out, before being bought and recast as the outfit we see today.
That was actually a good example of ignoring cost. Their original business model was to provide a basic version of their textbooks for free, essentially as OER, and then offer a “supped-up” version that students would pay for. The problem was that students didn’t want to pay for the enhanced version. Their venture capital investors pushed them to change the model, and they ultimately shifted toward a conventional publishing model. To me, that is a pretty clear example of cost winning out over content, features, and philosophy. The free version was not enough to sustain the business, and students weren’t willing to pay for the additional features.
What’s the path to an ecosystem approach?
The first step is recognizing the need. The next is forming a team of stakeholders committed to that vision. Then comes deciding what can be done without external support (slow building) and what requires it (fast building). I’ve given this a lot of thought over the past three months – actually, over the past six years, as we decided to expand LibreTexts beyond textbooks into homework and the other critical components of courseware (focusing on textbooks alone is not good enough).