Is K-12 Ready for Open Content Textbooks?
July 10th, 2006Fasten Your Seatbelts
Please keep your hands and arms inside the vehicle at all times…
Since the Wikibooks project turns three years old today, I thought it was a good time to think out loud about the potential promise of “Open Content” textbooks. I have been reading, downloading and bookmarking on this for a while, so this was mostly a matter of putting a few hours into reviewing and organizing my resources.
In pulling my thoughts together, however, it has become apparent to me that the degree of change necessary for most districts is both deeper, and more central to school reform and improvement than it appears on the surface.We really are talking about a systems level change. The technologies exist now, and tools are emerging almost daily to make alternative instructional planning and resource models available.
So why am I not jumping up and down about the state of Open Content? The state of curriculum design and use in schools is far more…grim…than I had ever realized. I think I’ve been the proverbial ostrich in some ways.
As a teacher I only used textbooks minimally – mostly for student reference and background while they were out of the classroom. I used many, many other types of resources as the basis for our activities as a class. As an administrator I encouraged, and continue to encourage, that type of teaching. The empahsis is on student and group needs, as compared to our standards, as the central steering points for designing instruction. To me, textbooks were and are just a loose framework, a skeletal image that require much support to engage students, and produce meaingful learning.
I have known for my entire career that textbooks were weak, watered down versions of mostly interesting topics. Textbooks are mostly just flat out boring. That was evident to me as a student in the 1970’s, and was something that I carried with me into my chosen profession. My own teaching never relied on textbooks. I took that opinion for granted.
Research shows, however, that for most teachers in most schools, the textbook actually is the curriculum. The links to the research are below. In addition, the process that resulted in poor textbooks in ’70s and ’80s has only gotten worse, and is more deeply ingrained in many places than I realized.
When we ask many teachers and school administrators to consider Open Content textbooks, we are asking them to essentially abandon their entire curriculum. Since Open Content users are also, we assume, contributors to the projects they are using, we are also asking teachers and administrators to move from the role of passive consumer to that of at least partial producer of instructional content.
The question then becomes “If not this, then what?”. There are many different flavors of Open Content being built at the moment, and no clear answer for K-12 organizations interested in exploring alternatives.
School districts who step away from the status quo will need to inspire, provide incentives, and cajole teachers and students to participate in Open Content projects well ahead of any planned change. They will need to build the capacity to slowly transition as Open Content resource become available, and the political and administrative climates adjust.
But most of all, the leaders for change in these schools and districts are going to have convince teachers and educational leaders in their organization that there is a need for something more. They are going to have to teach everyone about the differences between curriculum, and the resources that support that curriclum. They will need to change the way that textbooks are viewed, as well as the way most teachers teach. And, they will need to break the mold of textbooks adoption if they live in a state with those procedures in place.
These changes are not about technology, and they are huge. They are not impossible, but will require collaborative effort between schools or school districts in order to make a difference. There will need to be organizations which can take the initiative to work together over several years to build and use collaboratively created Open Content textbooks.
Meaningful improvements in schools will have to be associated with this Open Curriculum and Open Content textbook work, and some data will have to tracked and shared so that others will be able to gather the organizational capital to step outside the box.
These are major risks for educators to propose, and the more support they can garner to show that there have been successes with similar projects in the K-12 space, the more likely they will be to convince teachers, other administrators and parents that change is worth doing.