
Teachers write their own online textbook, save district $175,000 - tokenadult
http://www.therepublic.com/view/story/1dbc25bcc4ae4060a421fa204e91c0c8/MN--Online-Textbooks/
======
VengefulCynic
Have you ever been party to textbook adoption time? The textbook companies are
buying dinners and drinks for the teachers, "conferences" for the department
chairs and offers of all manner of paid amenities for the school district.

Obviously, with a pricing model that can afford sales costs like that and a
price tag like $175,000 for district-wide adoption of a single textbook, the
industry is ripe for disruption. At the same time, the industry probably has
lobbyists poised to protect their model with "think of the children."

I know that my wife (who has been through several of these textbook adoption
periods) is frustrated beyond belief based on the cost/benefit ratio of these
textbooks as opposed to what the district could probably pay its teachers to
produce themselves. I can only imagine that if this sort of thing spreads
beyond a negligible percentage of schools making their own texts, the textbook
makers will probably become more actively involved in stopping it.

~~~
wazoox
> _"think of the children."_

My children routinely carried 5 kg of books from the age of 8 years old up to
10 kg at times now that's they're 12 and 14. If there's an industry that
should die for the benefit of the children it's this one...

But for the time being the schools probably have something like 1 computer for
10 pupils, so the infrastructure really isn't there to switch to true online
material -- Though a 200 euros tablet could replace easily a huge stack of
books for a lot less money.

Unfortunately here in France the books must be certified by the ministry of
education, making the lobbying power of school books editors much more
efficient, because they only need to please a few government officials.

~~~
e40
My child (11) goes to a school in a top tier CA elementary school, and he has
never carried a single school book. Homework problems are all photocopies of
typed up problem sets.

I take that back, the books he carries are the ones he reads for pleasure (the
Harry Potter books are really huge, too). Once I get my Kindle Fire, I'm
giving him my old Kindle, which should help with that.

------
stock_toaster
It is a bit sad that things like:

 _> The problem with mass-produced textbooks, Engelhaupt explained, was that
they can cost $65 each and aren't aligned with Minnesota's math tests so the
district would be paying for whole chapters that are never used._

and

 _> She said most high school textbooks are written to the requirements of
Texas and California, the two biggest markets for the book publishers. It
means often a third of the books go unused in Minnesota, she said._

appear to be the current state of things. Instead of targeting a good
education in the subject, the norm today seems to be to teach k-12 students to
pass the aptitude tests, not necessarily to learn the material itself.

~~~
megablast
Why is the material taught different? Surely all kids should need to learn the
same information.

Why is Minnesota cutting out so much of the math that California and Texas
teaching? The students often end up going to the same colleges, where they
will need to do the same work?

~~~
blahedo
Off the top of my head: could be a breadth/depth thing, could be that the
books are a union of California and Texas (in which case CA and TX _also_ have
the problem of unused chapters), or it could be that the time not spent on
those chapters is spent on something that MN brings in with supplemental
reading already or just teaches without a textbook.

It almost certainly isn't just that MN is a simple subset of the CA/TX
material, or else the Byron district's scores wouldn't have gone up from the
new material.

------
edtechdev
Yeah there are hundreds of examples of open textbooks for both the K-12 and
college levels. It's nice to see a few school districts (and colleges - like
Western Governors) officially adopting them and replacing the old books.
However, again, thousands of instructors are already doing so individually
('edupunks' :)

Here are some open textbook sites:

<http://collegeopentextbooks.org/>

<http://www.openculture.com/free_textbooks>

<http://www.ck12.org/flexbook/>

<http://www.lightandmatter.com/books.html>

Related are the many wiki-based books & notes created in or for courses. For
example:

<http://anatowiki.wetpaint.com/>

<http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/FHSST_Physics>

~~~
tsellon
Here's a curated list of open texts for mathematics:
<http://linear.ups.edu/curriculum.html>

------
mgkimsal
How long before textbook publishers start threatening to sue districts that
use these sorts of texts? Or start playing with prices, such that districts
are 100% "publisher X" get discount pricing, while other districts get "a la
carte" pricing at 3-5x other districts?

Yes, I'm a bit far out about this stuff, but education is _big business_ and
the more this sort of idea spreads, the more it erodes publishers' profits -
they'll fight back sooner or later (maybe it's already happening?)

~~~
jeffreymcmanus
What would they sue them for? Not adequately meeting requirements of niche
markets?

If that were an actionable offense, you'd be able to sue half the startups in
Silicon Valley.

~~~
zizee
This situation reminds me of the telcos suing local governments for trying to
provide broadband services to their constituents. Never mind the fact they
local governments where only doing it because the telcos were neglecting them
as they were too small a market to bother with...

[http://tech.slashdot.org/story/08/09/12/2326251/telco-
sues-m...](http://tech.slashdot.org/story/08/09/12/2326251/telco-sues-
municipality-for-laying-their-own-fiber)

~~~
sixtofour
Exactly what I thought. They'll sue because government, through its public
employee teachers, are competing with business.

------
chrishenn
One of the physics teachers at my school wrote a textbook for his students. He
did so because he wasn't happy with whatever you can buy. I haven't taken the
class yet, but it's supposed to be one of the best at my school.

The district won't let him sell the book to his students, so they have to
print it out online. (It's here for anyone that's interested:
<http://www.tamdistrict.org/Page/3217>)

~~~
beloch
I have little doubt that a group of people well educated in any given subject
can do better than the average high-school text book. They're often riddled,
not just with mistakes, but fundamentally wrong lessons. First year university
physics courses often review a substantial amount of high-school material to
correct fundamental mistakes in students understanding of the basics.

I think the problem lies with the notion that people who _teach_ physics are
more qualified to write a text-book than people who _do_ physics. The result
is a pretty text-book that uses all the latest teaching tricks, but teaches
things that are wrong.

I'd like to see text-book companies moderate some kind of collaboration
between teachers and do'ers to produce a book that is both correct in its
content and easy for students to learn from. In a sense, first year physics
profs can also be viewed as the ultimate consumers of minds educated by high-
school texts. They have a good idea of what students need to learn in high-
school to be well grounded in their subject area for their first year of
university. Instead, we design text-books to help students perform well in
standardized tests that frequently prioritize the wrong things and make the
same mistakes as text-book writers.

~~~
chrishenn
I have a U.S. history textbook that starts off every chapter by listing the
California standard that will be covered.

It's pretty lame, but the good teachers are totally capable of making sure
they cover the standards that people seem to value so much, while still
teaching they're own unique experience or style. It just sucks because first
year teachers are handed the bare curriculum/standards/readings and don't
realize how much freedom they have to make it way better.

------
cturner
Oblig. feyman link on textbooks in schools:
<http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm>

------
TWSS
As someone with a failed education startup in my past, this makes me
deliriously happy. It means that there are still teachers out there who
haven't had all the initiative beaten out of them yet.

That said, yes, education publishing is a huge business. It's really only a
matter of time until the publishers take over the digital publishing space,
too.

------
daemin
On the one hand this is brilliant and a good 'rebuttal' to the expensive
textbook market. I think that this style works particularily well with
subjects such as Maths where there is little to no disagreement or controversy
on the subject matter taught (unlike say biology in the USA).

But that raises a concern of mine, where every school creates their own
textbook, they are free to include their own side or angle of a particular
topic, much to the detriment of their students. Sure this can be done in the
current situation, but I would wager it would be easier to get experts to
review one or a handful of textbooks rather than one for every school.

Maybe some sort of cooperative organisation is what is required here, to share
the best of the cooperatively created textbooks around.

~~~
aik
>> But that raises a concern of mine, where every school creates their own
textbook, they are free to include their own side or angle of a particular
topic

True, but who's to say a major publisher has experts and know what they're
doing? Signs point to the fact that they don't.

Also, they all have to teach to the standardized tests anyway, so they don't
have a massive amount of say.

------
artursapek
_a third of the books go unused in Minnesota_

The regional issues raised in this article are a great example of how
computers still have a lot of world-changing to do. Doing things the old-
fashioned way is sometimes just senseless when there's an alternative.

------
protomyth
I applaud the effort, but I will bet money on a follow-up story about a
copyright lawsuit filed by some publisher.

~~~
mechanical_fish
My guess is that suing free textbooks out of existence will be a losing
proposition on every level, so nobody will try.

Obviously, the optics will be terrible for the textbook company. That's
problem one.

Problem two: The first strategy of a lawsuit is scorched-earth: Force your
opponent to settle out of fear of legal expenses or an unpredictable jury.
But:

 _Foundation Executive Director Neeru Khosla said the foundation started five
years ago because she and her husband, Vinod Khosla, the founding CEO of Sun
Microsystems, wanted to improve math and science education in the country._

Gosh, I wonder if Neeru and Vinod Khosla know any IP lawyers who'd be willing
to help their nonprofit foundation defend some public schoolteachers?

The remaining strategy is to win the case. Maybe one of the schoolteachers was
actually foolish enough to copy a whole chapter from a copyrighted book. Oops.
Congratulations, that book goes off the web [1]...

... to be replaced by a different book with a new version of the infringing
chapter, written by a completely different schoolteacher.

Given that mathematics is hardly a trade secret, it's going to be hard to
squelch _all_ of it.

The textbook companies should save their money for lobbyists and free gifts.

\---

[1] I wonder if the foundation hosting this textbook has a DMCA safe harbor
defense. You would think so. But this is probably a good place to point out
that I Am Not A Lawyer, IP Or Otherwise, So I Know Nothing.

------
mixmastamyk
A compelling article. I'd love to see open-source textbooks on
github/bitbucket to be built to html/pdf and easily portable to kindle/ipad,
etc, etc. The ability for students to submit bugs and patches would be awesome
and empowering for them.

------
mquinlan
This type of approach seems to beg for collaboration between schools. If
something like this can be done for such a fraction of the normal price,
what's stopping a school from molding this existing text to their own
curriculum or building their own book from a repository of texts and other
existing "open-source" books? Then they could allocate spending elsewhere.

------
brudgers
I remember seeing Clifford Stoll on CSPAN saying something along the lines of
"Rich Schools will have good teachers, poor schools will just have computers."

The article reminds me that this will extend to textbooks.

[<http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/153929-1>]

------
motowilliams
I'm curious about how an Amazon Publishing house stepping into the education
arena might offer some disruption to the Texas Board of Education on their
indirect grip on textbook standards. I suppose there is a chance of lobbing
being replaced by a gaming of the system, as it were, but it might allow more
visibility into the content that is being used in the your child's district.
There is still the problem of the electronic media versus physical copies but
maybe a Raspberry PI at ~$25 would make it more appealing.

------
bd_at_rivenhill
I've been waiting for something like this to happen. If the teachers' unions
could get behind this on a national level and coordinate the creation of open
access online texts for all subjects, then I might start thinking that they're
something other than dinosaurs worthy of extinction. They have no reason to
support the publishers' goals of keeping prices high since less money spent on
textbooks is more money that can be spent on salaries, and their political
power would counterbalance the corporate lobbying.

------
dquigley
Maybe I missed it in the article, but what online tool were they using to
develop the textbook?

~~~
tokenadult
_Maybe I missed it in the article, but what online tool were they using to
develop the textbook?_

The tool is called CK-12 FlexBooks, and the link

<http://www.ck12.org/flexbook/>

is near the bottom of the submitted article.

------
biaxident
The thing that I was most amazed at in schools was the lack of sharing
resources. There was very little sharing between teachers in the same school
and even less between schools.

This seems like a massive waste of time as most of these teachers spend a
large amount of time creating these resources and most of these schools teach
very similar syllabuses.

Creating resources like this textbook is a great step forward, if more
teachers could collaborate to create really great resources it would not only
improve the education provided to students but also free up teachers from
spending all of their time creating custom resources.

------
grandalf
It should be a requirement to be hired as a teacher that a person be capable
of writing (or significantly contributing to) a quality textbook of the
subject matter they are going to teach.

------
WalterBright
It's a mystery to me why school textbooks are not a solved problem, after 100
years and tens of thousands of schools.

------
teja1990
Book Manufacturers instead of worrying about what this might do to the book
industry, it'll help if they think how to make it an advantge to us. Tweaking
always helps:)

------
ajaimk
This is great but the reality is also, "Professors write their own textbook,
cost students $175,000 and an arm"

~~~
artursapek
I don't understand. It doesn't mean the district spent less of their budget,
it just means it can spend it on more meaningful things like promoting sports
and the arts.

~~~
aheilbut
You don't understand. What happens is that once the teachers/professors (this
happens more often in universities) realize that they can force the students
to use _their_ textbook, they do a deal with a publishing company and sell the
book to the students for $120 a pop.

~~~
_delirium
Yeah, this is unfortunately common, but it's also fairly common for professors
to give their students a free book, or one that costs whatever the university
bookstore charges for printing a spiral-bound softcover book. That usually
happens with professors whose class notes grew over the years to the point
where they basically formed a textbook, but for various reasons (disinterest,
saturated market, etc.) they didn't take the final step of actually publishing
a textbook.

~~~
jules
The €5 textbooks I buy from my professors have consistently been the best
textbooks, much better than the €120 textbooks in other courses.

------
HilbertSpace
Okay, the book they wrote is at

[http://moodle.anoka.k12.mn.us/mod/resource/view.php?inpopup=...](http://moodle.anoka.k12.mn.us/mod/resource/view.php?inpopup=true&id=26398)

and I started reading it.

Don't.

No one should take a course from that book. The authors of the book don't know
the subject.

That book won't be a prerequisite for anything important.

So, if want a first course in probability and statistics, then get a college
textbook and/or just go to college.

More generally, in college in the US, in math, physical science, and
engineering, quite good texts are easy to find, and the best texts are
excellent. Moreover, the prerequisites for college are quite basic,
essentially just the '3Rs' where for 'rithmetic' we do include algebra and
plane geometry (trigonometry and solid geometry would also be good).

So, in K-12, just get the 3Rs and then start with college texts and/or just
college.

In particular, for anything much past the 3Rs, just f'get about K-12. Bluntly,
as illustrated by the book of this thread, the K-12 system is rarely able to
teach anything worthwhile much beyond just the basic 3Rs.

This conclusion is not new: Once I looked at AP calculus. Don't. The people
who wrote the AP calculus materials don't understand calculus. Instead, for
calculus, just get a good college text and dig in. I learned from Johnson and
Kiokemeister, taught from Protter and Morrey, and have seen several other good
college calculus texts, e.g., from Thomas. When I was studying and, later,
teaching calculus in college, there was no shortage of good texts. Just why
K-12 has so much trouble getting good calculus texts is strange and tragic.

Once I looked at some materials on optimization, i.e., linear programming,
developed by the K-12 system in North Carolina. Don't. Those materials fill
several much needed gaps on the library shelves and would be illuminating if
ignited. The authors didn't understand linear programming.

The site

<http://boston.conman.org/2004/01/21.1>

has some excellent quotes from Feynman looking at K-12 texts. Feynman was
correct, and apparently the situation has not changed.

My qualifications: I hold a Ph.D. from one of the world's best research
universities; there I did research on optimization and also on stochastic
optimal control. For calculus, I've done well studying it, advanced calculus,
and well beyond, taught calculus in college, applied calculus in business and
to problems of US national security, and published peer-reviewed original
research using calculus. For optimization, I've studied it at advanced levels,
applied it in both in business to problems of US national security, taught it
in college and graduate school, and published peer-reviewed original research
in it. My startup has some original, crucial, core, powerful, valuable 'secret
sauce' that is based on some advanced topics in applied math including
'analysis' (way past calculus), probability, and statistics.

~~~
xyzzyz
Not everybody on HN is able to judge textbook's quality, so I'd like to
clarify:

There's nothing wrong with relative quality of this textbook, compared to
regular high school textbooks on this subject. The thing is, all high school
textbooks are total crap.

I wouldn't go as far as to state that author don't know the subject (although,
saying from experience, it's highly likely). The problem is that they don't
teach anything substantial, and what they do teach, is vague and unclear. The
chapter about distributions and density functions is _total_ nonsense.

Serious probability course covers all contents of this book on one or two
2-hours lectures, in much, much more general setting (i.e., probability being
the measure on measurable space). This book seems to be meant for 40 hours
(one hour per section). It's not like undergraduates are 20 times smarter than
high school kids. They just want to learn it, or at least to get a passing
grade. The same is the case with high school kids, but the amount of actual
work to get a passing grade there is negligible, and they're motivated
accordingly. High school teachers cannot just give a failing grade to 80% of
her class, because it would mean that there's a problem with her, not with her
students. She also cannot depend on necessary prerequisites to serious
probability theory to be already known, because it's not, just like university
professors cannot depend on probability to be known, because if one learns
from books like this, it's not. Without system reform, there's not much that
can be done from bottom up.

~~~
ramy_d
I'm not versed in the entire complexity of the issue at hand here, but isn't
putting the text book in the hands of teachers a kind of reform?

Wouldn't having a teacher, or teachers, write their own text books give them
better control over what to teach?

Couldn't a collection of teacher add something to the curriculum through the
text book and watch it get adopted higher up structurally based mostly on the
fact that if the teachers teaching those students specifically added material
they found was necessary then it must be important enough to require it
officially.

The story is written as a money saving venture first, and then a better
alignment of course material to state standards, but I'd also like to think it
might democratize what those state standards should be amongst a population of
professionals who interact on a daily basis with the people who have to test
against those standards.

