What is Free About Free Textbooks?

I've been on a little hiatus from blogging while pounding out several grant applications. We've used grants to fund a number of the programs we now have available, including EvoBeaker, OsmoBeaker, Maine Explorer for 7-9th grades (coming out soon), and our new SimUText system that some of you may be helping to test. Though much of our development comes from sales, the grant money has been critical for two things: it helps get new programs off the ground, and it helps support educational research to find where students have problems, and whether our materials make a difference. Because there is so little materials money in education (outside of textbooks), it would be really hard for us to produce anything brand new without the grant support.

Nevertheless, though our sales alone cannot yet support major new efforts or research studies, they do have a huge benefit both to us and, I would argue, to society. Grants will support initial development, but they don't usually support putting on the polish you need for a new tool to get widely used. Grants almost never give money to do user support and bug fixes, continuing improvements, upgrades for, say, new operating systems that break your software, and all the other little things that change a program from being usable by a few early adopters to being usable by a broad audience of busy instructors. The other thing that grants never support is marketing and sales. I never used to think of marketing as a benefit to society, but I've come to see it that way. People are busy. Even if in principal they want to use new tools, most instructors are too busy to find them, try them, and incorporate them into their classes. So marketing (so they know about it) and sales (to give a little nudge to them to try it, and help make that easy) is, in the end, important for getting teaching innovations used widely.

So in light of this, I had a very mixed reaction to news that California has decided to put their foot down and declare that all textbooks used in CA schools should be digital and free. On the one hand, this could have a very positive effect. Because of consolidation in the industry over the last decade, there are only a handful of major textbook publishers left that control most of the textbook market, and like with any large semi-monopoly, the amount of real, new innovation that these companies produce is pretty small. This is a shame because there are many exciting ideas and opportunities to use new technology to teach better. I'm at a conference right now with a number of educational technology companies and there's a lot of cool stuff I'm seeing. Yet the textbooks from the major publishers have skyrocketed in price during this consolidation period, and that sucks up the dollars and mindshare for educational tools, leaving very little time and/or money for new innovations from independent groups. So forcing the hand of the educational system to try new ideas and tools is great.

On the other hand, all these little companies like ours need to pay the people writing these innovative new teaching tools. Quite a bit of the initial money can come from grants, but I've seen one neat grant-funded idea after another get close to being usable, the grant runs out, and either the tool is never released or it is released but not supported and gradually decays away. The long-term is as important as the short-term, and it doesn't happen for free. Nor does getting word out and convincing people to try something innovative. It's a shame in a lot of ways, but that is how the world works, and the costs seem not to be recognized in a lot of the K-12 world. Many people (now perhaps including the governor of California) just expect educational things to be free without wondering who is going to work on them for free. So I hope that California, in making its free textbook line-in-the-sand, has thought about how groups like us are going to afford to build and support the next wave of new teaching tools that California schools will use. If they expect all their students to learn from wikipedia, I think they are doing their students a real disservice. But if they expect to provide alternate pools of continuing support that can nurture academic groups and small businesses (as well as any innovative larger publishers), then this could be a real boon towards moving educational materials forward.

And with that little self-justification, back to writing these grant proposals.