What if Napster stocked textbooks? Engineering professor Richard Baraniuk talks about his vision for Connexions, an open-source system that lets teachers share digital texts and course materials, modify them and give them to their students -- all free, thanks to Creative Commons licensing.
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Why not produce "open source" DVD's of the best teachers teaching the best courses?
This and free books and materials would cut down on the cost of education.
Two words: "About time."
My wife teaches anthropology and was just sweating about how much her students have to pay for the books for her class the other day. She felt guilty for one of the texts costing $60 until I reminded her that the last biology text I bought ran more than double that used.
The textbook publishing industry has been getting away with murder for way too long.
JL: I've been involved in efforts to make the open source textbook, but things have gone slowly in that direction.
I think for teaching you need real people doing real things sometimes, but much more can be done in the way you suggest than is done now.
Especially if we add wii technology.
Open source textbooks would certainly make many aspects of teaching easier, and might even make higher education more accessible to low-income students.
However, if I need to have a parotid gland tumor removed, I'd rather not have a surgeon who's been wii-trained in anatomy (Bell's palsy isn't a pleasant consequence of a poor 3D understanding of the complex course of the facial nerve). Some subjects are better taught (and learned) in more traditional ways, and besides, many students actually seem to prefer face-to-face dialogue with an instructor, in small group settings.
A major point that was not discussed in the TED lecture is how to compensate the authors and peer-reviewers of the opensource books and learning materials. Will this work be done on government grants or by altruistic educators on their own time?
Until you address the compensation issue, it won't happen. The project I was working on involved getting a big government grant to produce the book(s). That would be tax dollars well spent if administered properly.