Educational Materials/Paper: Difference between revisions
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== Introduction == | == Introduction == | ||
Over the course of twentieth century, the American textbook market evolved into the proprietary domain of large and multinational publishing houses. Only in the past few years have online collaboration and digital publishing lowered the costs of production and allowed for new entrants in the educational materials (EM) field. Thus far, however, new forms of EM have not had a disruptive effect on the traditional textbook market. | |||
Advances in internet technologies and print-on-demand services have coincided with consumer advocacy campaigns and budgetary realities pushing the political climate to be more amenable to seeking alternatives to the traditional copyrighted and expensively bound textbook. A consensus has started to form that the traditional textbook is a broken model. Open Educational Resources (OER) offer a free content alternative, and new business models have emerged attempting sell the service of EM provision atop free content. This paper discusses the evolving political economy of EM in the US and offers a set of observations and preliminary recommendations regarding current barriers to peer production and open access of EM designed for the K-12 and Higher Education levels. In particular, our analysis looks at current OER and for-profit models and their potential for expansion and sustainability. | |||
At the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, we have been studying the US Educational Materials industry as part of a larger research project aimed at mapping models of knowledge flow and appropriation across a range of economic variables. Our goal is to understand how intellectual property and other factors affect the movement and utility and usage of knowledge generally, through the selection of a targeted set of industrial sectors for research and analysis. We are mapping the actors, trends, and activities around cooperation in each of these sectors to understand the broader forces motivating cooperation in general, but also the policies that came into places as forces shaping each of these spaces. | |||
Our four sectors are biotechnology, educational materials, alternative energy, and telecommunications. We are interested in the actors are in these sectors, what models they choose to leverage in their knowledge work, and why and when commons-based models emerge and gain traction. The project is built on an analysis of a set of knowledge-intensive industrial sectors representing a gradient of knowledge appropriation styles ranging from significant commons adoption to negligible commons adoption, and focuses within each discipline on paradigmatic knowledge products for deeper analytics. | |||
=== Description of the EM Market === | === Description of the EM Market === | ||
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=== Our Research Questions === | === Our Research Questions === | ||
== Our Methodology == | == Our Methodology == | ||
Revision as of 11:23, 3 December 2009
Increasing Participation and Decreasing Regulation in the Educational Materials Industry
(A Summary Paper of our Research to date)
By Erhardt Graeff and Carolina Rossini
Last Draft: November 30, 2009
Introduction
Over the course of twentieth century, the American textbook market evolved into the proprietary domain of large and multinational publishing houses. Only in the past few years have online collaboration and digital publishing lowered the costs of production and allowed for new entrants in the educational materials (EM) field. Thus far, however, new forms of EM have not had a disruptive effect on the traditional textbook market.
Advances in internet technologies and print-on-demand services have coincided with consumer advocacy campaigns and budgetary realities pushing the political climate to be more amenable to seeking alternatives to the traditional copyrighted and expensively bound textbook. A consensus has started to form that the traditional textbook is a broken model. Open Educational Resources (OER) offer a free content alternative, and new business models have emerged attempting sell the service of EM provision atop free content. This paper discusses the evolving political economy of EM in the US and offers a set of observations and preliminary recommendations regarding current barriers to peer production and open access of EM designed for the K-12 and Higher Education levels. In particular, our analysis looks at current OER and for-profit models and their potential for expansion and sustainability.
At the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, we have been studying the US Educational Materials industry as part of a larger research project aimed at mapping models of knowledge flow and appropriation across a range of economic variables. Our goal is to understand how intellectual property and other factors affect the movement and utility and usage of knowledge generally, through the selection of a targeted set of industrial sectors for research and analysis. We are mapping the actors, trends, and activities around cooperation in each of these sectors to understand the broader forces motivating cooperation in general, but also the policies that came into places as forces shaping each of these spaces.
Our four sectors are biotechnology, educational materials, alternative energy, and telecommunications. We are interested in the actors are in these sectors, what models they choose to leverage in their knowledge work, and why and when commons-based models emerge and gain traction. The project is built on an analysis of a set of knowledge-intensive industrial sectors representing a gradient of knowledge appropriation styles ranging from significant commons adoption to negligible commons adoption, and focuses within each discipline on paradigmatic knowledge products for deeper analytics.