What Might a MOOC-Text Look Like?

Reading material associated with a K-12 or college level course can be organized into two broad categories:

First you’ve got novels, short stories, poems, non-fiction books and essays that primarily consist of just words (maybe with the occasional image or diagram) on the printed page.

Then you’ve got K-12 or college textbooks which curate a wide range of materials (text, photographs, graphic illustrations, charts, assessment questions and exercises), often designed with almost magazine-style layouts meant to keep the reader engaged while pulling them along certain pedagogical pathways.

Each of these categories faces challenges when moved to electronic formats.

As mentioned yesterday, moving a novel from print to e-reader can add new visual and tactile feedback (and potentially endless distractions) to what was once a quieter, more intimate reading experience.

Heavily styled textbooks which break up material in complex ways face a different challenge in the e-world: how to preserve designs and pedagogies that work on the printed page when their electronic versions might be read on different devices of different sizes and shapes.

Those issues aside, high-style texts are generally made for a mass market where adoption by hundreds or thousands of professors teaching tens or hundreds of thousands of students can justify the high cost of production (and high mark-ups by both publishers and book stores).  And the recent Coursera announcement about free texts initially talks about classes that fall into mass-market course categories (such as Intro Composition and Physics).

But none of the fifteen courses I’ve either finished or am currently taking can be described as mass market.  Which means at least a sizable representative sample of MOOC classes deal with reading requirements by either: (1) not having any assigned reading at all (the solution for a bulk of my classes so far); or (2) trying to curate their own reading lists, ideally made up of material that is available free from online sources.

Option (2) seems to provide room to maneuver in an age when so much primary and secondary academic material is published online.  But as I mentioned yesterday, this can lead to a fragmented reading experience, even when the assigned reading can all be found in the public domain.

But a fair amount of material (especially contemporary content) is not in the public domain.  And this leaves professors who want students to study this non-free stuff in a quandary of whether to assign it (even if some students may need to pay to obtain it); or avoiding inclusion of any copyrighted material in their reading lists.

So if the repurposed traditional mass-market texts mentioned above represent one model for MOOC-based textbooks; a course-specific, custom-published book could represent another.

When I described the custom publishing industry a couple of posts back, I forgot to mention that one of the key services they offer is clearance of copyrights on materials they combine into a single printed or e-book volume.  And their ability to affordably customize books for classes as small as a few dozen students might make their services suitable for MOOC professors looking to consolidate reading into a single, copyright-cleared text.

The third publishing route MOOCs might take would be to create new, unique textbooks for a specific online course.  The closest I’ve come to this so far is the Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours text which is tightly wound with all the other course material associated with edX’s Greek Hero course.  And while I suspect that special dispensation has been made by the author and publisher to make this available for free, there’s nothing preventing a prolific professor from building a course around work they’ve already developed to create a similar integrated experience.

Now all of this might end up costing something.  And while I know one of the big benefits of free learning is that it’s free, we may eventually need to discover where students will spend not just hours but dollars for genuine value (or value-add) to their MOOC experiences.

One of the things that make free learning so appealing is that it gives us the chance to “stick it to the man” (said “man” being colleges and publishers that seem to be gouging the public by charging tens of thousands a year in tuition, or hundreds of dollars for a single textbook).  But with regard to textbooks, even if $100-$150+ might seem like too much for a single book, zero is way too little if you want anything beyond a bunch of links to public-domain materials.

What’s the proper price for textbooks (or MOOCs for that matter)?  I don’t have an answer (yet).  But even as we continue to think and talk about it, I suspect we won’t know for sure until someone dares to slap a price tag on something and sees what happens next.