"Open University announces £5.65 million project to make learning material free on the internet. "The Open University today announced a GBP £5.65 million (US $9.9 million) project to make a selection of its learning materials available free of charge to educators and learners around the world. Supported by a grant of US $4.45 million from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation the University will launch the website in October 2006." Link
It is unclear what is meant by "learning materials" in the press release. It is also unclear why making them available online should cost GBP 5.65 million (USD 9.9 million). I suppose that converting video tape to digital video could be expensive, but print materials are created electronically. Posting them should be a matter of posting them. It will be interesting to see if this projects includes full texts, so that one could build a usable curriculum on the materials posted.
Re: Re: Re: Open Content Initiative <irony>How unexpected, given the affiliation that you list in your signature</irony>
Oho! The thing is that I'd be delighted to be wrong. I just find that the people who have been sponsoring academic open content have focused on things to help instructors build courses quickly rather than to lower costs for students. Both are worthwhile, but evidently the former is lower hanging fruit. -=Steve=-
The markup on textbooks is non-trivial. Schools -- either from the central office or through their instructors -- mandate which curriculum materials students must employ. As long as schools can mandate highly profitable texts, the demand for low-cost learning materials will remain low.
Moreover, in the U.S. at least, many schools make a lot of money from the markup in their bookstores. However, schools in the developing world cannot mandate hundred dollar textbooks, and from them alone there's a huge potential market for free or low cost alternatives. -=Steve=-
