A reason why Stanford is offering some free online classes

Today's Chronicle has a brief article on Stanford offering 10 online computer science classes for free.  Better yet, the course content will be covered under Creative Commons.

The courses can be found at:

http://see.stanford.edu/see/courses.aspx

The Chronicle article asks why Stanford would do something like this:  exposure, testing an online market, etc. etc. 

My read on this effort is that trying something new, particularly when the new thing is open to the world, can spur downstream innovation that is not predictable.  The effort to open up materials to the world is pretty minimal, as the courses and materials are probably already built.  What is needed is the cultural shift to open materials.

Can we do the same thing?  How much of our training and best practices materials could we license with creative commons and share with the world? 

How many great courses have been built with faculty who would be happy to share the content if we provided a route? 

How many of our students would benefit from being able to interact with the wider world during a course if our platforms supported this?

How much would we all benefit if openness becomes the norm - and we participated (and participated in leading) this change of thinking?

Comments

[Anthony Helm]

I had considered posting this as a new entry rather than a comment, but it seems related to this story.

On Ars today there is an article (http://tinyurl.com/3g6kr9) about a new startup, Flat World Knowledge. Their business model is to give away academic textbooks for free on the web, but to make money through ancillary sales of study guides and alternative versions (paper, Kindle, etc.) and to give 20% of sales back to faculty authors.

I'm a proponent of open knowledge, and lower textbook costs, but I wonder how faculty feel, especially here at Dartmouth. How many would be willing to take the risk and how many are wedded to the more traditional model?

Will traditional publishers reach a point where they feel their model no longer works well, especially given the increasing appearance of textbooks on P2P sites? Like the RIAA and the MPAA, will they be too slow to turn the ship?

What are your thoughts?

[Joshua Kim]

Anthony...I'm with you in not yet understand the Dartmouth textbook economy.

This was always a huge issue at my other institutions - so I'm very curious.

At a minimum, I'm hoping that e-book readers like Kindle lead the way to finally moving off the terrible model of extremely expensive paper textbooks (and the used textbook sales that keep the new editions so expensive).

I wonder if we should be actively trying to start a pilot program for Kindle textbooks.....maybe in some sort of pilot relationship with Amazon. There has to be courses where the costs of the new books are so high (maybe medical/science courses) where the actual reader is only a fraction of the total cost - and students could get the reader and all the text for the same price as the new texts alone?

[Anthony Helm]

Given the likelihood that we (AHRC and Curricular Computing) are perhaps more likely to interact with faculty, it may be worth pursuing. Similarly, we should begin informally collecting opinions from faculty about their publishing goals. I may be naive in thinking that for many of them the primary goal is professional relevance rather than profit.