Bonus Assignment #4: Open Content
Minimum length: 100 words for post, 140 characters (Twitter message length) for each reply. Be concise and to the point.
Due: Saturday, February 13
Where: Post to the Class Blog
Scoring Rubric: Use this Discussion Forum Rubric as a guide for assessing your own work. I will use it to guide my scoring.
Open education is the simple and powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a public good and that technology in general and the web in particular provide an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse knowledge. http://www.hewlett.org/oer
Washington state community and technical colleges are launching an Open Course Library project. Read the Horizon Report below. In your opinion, Will free or low-cost open textbooks make higher education more affordable? Why or why not? Share your thoughts on the public class blog.
Jonghoon Kim
ReplyDeleteWe are living in a world which is full of information and there’s bunch of ways to approach those information. Almost everyone have their own computer and cell phones which can be a method to get to the information.
There must be people who couldn’t get higher education just because they didn’t have chance to have it. The reasons could be money or time. If the text books are low price or free online. Those people who didn’t have money or time to be educated will have chance. They can study through online on cell phone and on computer by themselves.
If you want to post a comment to your classmate, just post another Comment. Begin your post with a line like this: I agree/disagree with Janice's opinion. I think ....
ReplyDeletePlease remember to include your name or initials for extra points.
Jennifer
Education is a means not an end by itself. One has to be able to get eductaion and use his/her knowledge to contribute to the common good of the society at large. Hence education should be affordable and available for all who need it. But the situation in the US seems the reverse. The cost of education (tution, books and materials) is very high and getting higher. Many are taking loans to pay for their education, and they have to pay for long years, which make it hard for them to further their education to a higher level. In our time where sharing of knowledge and information is becoming simpler day after day the cost of education and books should be not be this high. It should be optimum to a reasonable level that is affordable for the majority, and not discouraging for book authors, publishers and education institutions. I believe keeping the balance is very crucial. If the cost remains high users may avoid schools, books and start depending on easily available free online materials. On the otherhand if the cost becomes too low authors and publishers wil be discouraged to produce new and useful materials and that will gradually limit our knowledge base and affect all of us.
ReplyDeleteAbdu
With few exceptions I agree with John's idea of making books affordable or free. My diferences are as I mentioned in my post, if the prices of books are too low or free, who is going to write the books (especially the good and credible ones)? The second point is yes there are lots of information even free books on line, but the question is how many of those books are credible? Are they available with out violating the property right of those produced them? Can we fully depend on these online materials for our studies and research works? My belief is that we need the books, we need fresh and useful works of our scientists and professors, but we need them to be affordable (free is nice, but not always work). Let's debate on it.
ReplyDeleteConsidering that college textbooks can cost upward of $100 or more, yes free or low-cost open textbooks might make higher education more affordable for many students. However, like Abdu said, there is a logical reason why college textbooks are so expensive: the production costs of such textbooks are high because of the amount of effort it takes to write a detailed textbook on a specialized academic subject that only college students (not the general public) will read. Therefore the inherent costs of the textbooks might have to be compensated in other ways, perhaps with higher tuition, which would undermine the point of offering free or low-cost textbooks in the first place.
ReplyDeleteThe average student spends nearly 1000 dollars a year on books that are required for his or her class and for those who struggle finically access to inexpensive online books would help out tremendously. I really do believe that offering free or low-cost open textbooks will make getting a higher education more attainable for some but it would have its downsides as well. Each student has their own learning style, some would have no problem with staring at a computer screen all day while clicking the mouse instead of turning pages, I however am not one of those people. I enjoy/learn more effectively with the materials I need to learn are in a form that I can highlight and make notes in the margins. Although technology and online resources are great there are still people that do not have internet access during all point of the day, for these people completing readings and studying off online books could be quite challenging.
ReplyDeleteRebecca Hall
Kevin Pedersen
ReplyDeleteI agree with these posts so far. It seems to me that if money is lost on free/inexpensive textbooks that schools will find a way to make up that money some how. That might be through higher tuition, or maybe classes would make you prove that you purchased a legit textbook for the class? So my opinion is that some students may save, but ultimately schools or publishers will have to find a way to make up for the loss of revenue.
I agree with most of the post so far, However, I would like to interject that although we would be offered free texts books, does that mean that the material will have the most up to date information regarding the course? The most obvious answer would be no, because if the college publishers chose to give away such information for free than the amount of information may not be as complete for the subject. On the other hand, for Community Colleges such as North Seattle, many of the subjects are general compared to the Universities, because we are just completing the prerequisites to gain entrance into the university. This type of learning institution is the building blocks to our success leading to a 4 or even 8 year degree depending on your education goals. The books that are required for our courses only serve as a starting point for our subjects, and if we choose to discover more in depth information regarding a subject such as science, medicine, or technology we as students should decide to look elsewhere for our information needs.
ReplyDeleteI think that in principle low-cost anything would make higher education more affordable, and that includes textbook, I guess what I’m saying is, why stop there? And knowing how colleges and universities play capitalism all the time, they will just find another way to make money if a new “low-cost” initiative goes into effect, and that’s something everyone else her as mentioned in some way or another. So I think low-cost textbooks, would, for a start, of course be a good idea, whenever something is cheaper, especially when it involves school, that can never be a bad thing, but only if it isn’t used as cover by the respective institution to create a wallet-friendly façade, only to raise costs elsewhere
ReplyDeleteCina Ebrahimi