237 – Open Textbooks

[00:00:07] Lucie: Hi, and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. My name’s Lucie Hazelgrove-Planel, I’m a social impact scientist and anthropologist, and I’m here today with David Stern. I was listening back to some of the episodes you recorded with Santiago about the, all of the textbook ideas at IDEMS that are coming, coming into being. And I found that really interesting, it’s a really exciting project. But I was also thinking how much do other people know of the challenges of textbooks in, let’s say non-European or non-American sort of countries?

[00:00:40] David: Even that, the difference between textbooks in the US and textbooks in Europe, they’re totally different. And the fact that textbooks play these different roles in different contexts is very interesting.

[00:00:52] Lucie: Oh, what? I don’t know anything about the US context, so tell me more.

[00:00:56] David: So in the US, textbooks are central to university education in a way that in most European contexts, they’re not.

[00:01:02] Lucie: Wow. No, yet I can’t even imagine that.

[00:01:05] David: So, in most European contexts people work with lecture notes. Your lecturers actually maybe create their own lecture notes and they then distribute lecture notes as part of the course, and they might refer you to textbooks that sit in the library. And the libraries then have textbooks and you go to the library to access the textbooks you want, and a few people might like a textbook and then buy it. 

In the US, at universities, almost every course would tend to have an allocated textbook, which students are expected to buy. This is a very simplistic characterisation of two distinct systems, and there are of course many different variants of this. There’s a huge open textbook community in the US, which has grown up around the fact that while students shouldn’t have to buy these textbooks, they should be able to access the textbooks for free in different contexts and so on.

So there’s a wonderful community of people working on open textbooks in the US and there are different models to this. There’s groups who have created open textbooks as a sort of organization to say we’ll employ the authors, we’ll create the textbooks, they’re acting like a publisher. There are also lecturers who have essentially taken the European approach of creating lecture notes and turned those into textbooks, and there’s communities of these authors all across the place. I should say, my knowledge on this is mostly coming from mathematical textbooks or statistical or data science textbooks, but I believe the same applies across the board in terms of these differences in the systems.

[00:02:43] Lucie: Well, when you were, yeah, when you were just talking about the States and people having textbooks, it reminded me of medical students I know, and I’m sure biology and things like that. They all have textbooks, at the beginning at least. And I think they’re really expensive too. So this idea of open source things, that sounds very useful.

[00:02:58] David: And as you say, this is where in the UK there are places and there are subjects which use textbooks more, and the same in other European contexts, but the lecture note approach is much more developed. This is, most UK and European universities would tend to have this, something more built around lecture notes rather than textbooks. And so it’s interesting, these distinctions. 

But as you say, this is all very different again, when you get to very low resource environments.

[00:03:29] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:03:29] David: Because, I still remember going to the library when I first arrived in 2008 as a lecturer in Kenya, and the textbooks in the library, and there wasn’t anything recent. There were some interesting textbooks and there, mathematics doesn’t change all that much in certain ways, and so there were actually some very nice old textbooks, the classics, so to speak. But it was not what in other contexts would be considered a modern library.

[00:04:02] Lucie: No.

[00:04:03] David: And there were students who took advantage, but there were many less textbooks than there were students. So there was no way, if all students wanted to access those textbooks, it just wouldn’t be possible. There’s hundreds or thousands of students on a course and a very small number of relevant textbooks in the library is part of that context. And of course, in that context, you can’t easily expect people to buy textbooks.

Now, when you get down to schools, then it’s different, and textbooks in schools play a very different role. In Kenya, textbooks in schools are a really big deal and they are an interesting market. There are Kenyan textbook publishers, and that’s a whole different story. But at the university level, the market’s not big enough and people aren’t buying them. At the high school level, this is a big market and occasionally the government makes big purchases, and so it’s a viable business model for publishers to get textbooks.

There are issues around quality, there’s so many different issues, but there are textbooks playing an important role at a national level, at the school level within somewhere like Kenya and many African countries. I don’t actually know, that’s a context, I know many different African contexts, I know East African context, West African context, Southern African context, not so much about the North African context, although I’ve worked there, but never on the textbook sort of stuff.

But a lot of these things are similar, although every context has its uniqueness, but the school level prominence of textbooks is something which many African countries have as part of their systems and how public or private it is, that totally changes. So in Ethiopia, the textbooks that are created are government-created, and government-managed in a much more rigorous way, which is very different to Kenya, where you have your private textbook providers who then source the textbooks, which the government then purchases.

And so it’s a different dynamic, public or private sector on this. And there are differences. So in Ethiopia, the textbook authors, they are colleagues of ours from Bahir Dar University for certain grades, they are the textbook authors for the government. They’ve used university lecturers to do this, and so we know them and we’ve discussed with them.

[00:06:28] Lucie: Yeah, that’s interesting. But yeah, with the school textbooks, like, this was where I was coming to, this is what I was thinking of. I’ve been in contexts where – post-colonial contexts – where they’re still using the colonial countries’ old textbooks in a completely different context, basically. And I think that has hopefully changed now in – let’s say, I hope so, let’s say – all countries. But it comes back to your idea of contextualising things and personalising.

[00:06:56] David: So Zach, who of course we’ve had some episodes with in the past, my favorite thing from him is, as a teacher, he’d always carry a dice in his pocket. And the reason for this is that, when he was being taught maths and probability in particular, all his textbooks and the exercises would talk about this mysterious thing of a dice, and he had never seen one. He’d never interacted with one. He didn’t have a clue of what it was. And so, as a teacher, he made sure his students would never have that issue. 

So he always carried a dice in his pocket so that he could say, this is what they mean by a dice.  Look, this is what it is, this is what you know, how it works, and so on. Because that’s something which – my kids have been using dice before they could talk – it’s something which is just part of the games that we play and part of the things we do, and so therefore it’s a natural thing to use in education where dice are part of the sort of culture and the communities.

But it has been a really interesting learning experience to understand how much of a barrier that language can be.

[00:08:04] Lucie: Exactly, and I mean we see this in our research method support work too, that, even if we use a different kind of data set, you know, if we’re working with agronomists and we use a data set about something completely different, that produces a learning barrier to them in order to really understand “what am I doing here?” “Why am I doing it?” Perhaps, “how can I reproduce it in my own context?”

[00:08:27] David: Exactly. The importance of using, in adult education particularly, the importance of actually enabling people to start where they are, with what they know, what they can do, and then move forward. And the idea, to come back to the textbooks, the thing which I think is so interesting where, when I talk to the Open Textbook community in the US, one of the things that we believe in very strongly is the need for, and the importance of variants to be able to get contextualisation different in different contexts. And one of the things I find very interesting is that the US based open textbook communities, they’re really advanced, they’re great, they don’t believe in variants.

[00:09:18] Lucie: Ah, but can I just check? Does the open textbook community, do they also publish freely available things? Do the two go hand in hand?

[00:09:29] David: Yeah. By “open textbooks”, these are textbooks which are released under open licenses so they are not just free to access. Now, I should say, there’s interesting controversies around exactly which open license, so as we’re engaging with this, the Creative Commons licensing is the most well known and a very simple and nice way to think about open licenses, particularly for educational resources.

And so we don’t need to get stuck into the details of this, but they have open. So really “open” is what would be called Creative Common 0 – that has no restrictions, that’s totally, you can do what you want with it. “CC BY” means you need to give credit by, you need to give credit to.

[00:10:18] Lucie: Say who it’s by. Yeah.

[00:10:19] David: Yeah, say who it is by. Exactly, it’s easy. Then there’s SA, which is Share Alike. And you can of course have BY and Share Alike, or you can just have Share Alike. And that means that if you are going to use this, then you have to release whatever you do under a similar license. 

Then of course, after Share Alike, another thing you could want is Non-Commercial. Now, this is very interesting ’cause everyone misunderstands this. They think Non-Commercial means, oh, I’m releasing this and I’m not wanting to make a profit, no. If you have a Non-Commercial license, that means you retain the commercial rights. So if somebody wants to use this for commercial purposes, then you have to actually get it under a different license. You have retained those commercial rights. 

The next one is No Derivatives. And No Derivatives means you can distribute it freely, but you can’t make derivative versions, you can’t make variants. And we’re actually, in what we’re doing, we’re working with any type of license, any combination of these except the No Derivatives. We cannot work with non derivative licenses because non derivative licenses, we’re not able to do our variants. 

We can work with Non-Commercial licenses, but interestingly, they would not be considered open by certain definitions of this. There was a nice description on the Creative Commons website, which sort of had that line of saying that actually if you retain the commercial rights, then actually this isn’t what, I believe, they called public good or something like that.

[00:12:03] Lucie: Because you’re still potentially going to make money out of it, down the line.

[00:12:06] David: Yes, you could still potentially retain the rights to make money out of this, and therefore this is not openly available to everyone to use and to reuse. Whereas the Share Alike and the BY licenses, these are fine. They’re considered part of open licenses, and so you can have these are valid open licenses in what the open source or the broader open community would consider open.

And, we’re less strict than that, we’re open by default as our principle, and we’re not saying everything needs to be open. We can work with people who have a No Commercial license, and I think that’s something which is important and there are good reasons why people might want that non-commercial license to retain the commercial rights.

What I do find annoying is most people I talk to who have non-commercial licenses, they have non-commercial licenses because they misunderstood non-commercial, not because they actually want a non-commercial license. That is a frustrating piece. If somebody’s actually set up to use a non-commercial license, then they need to be able to set up, to be able to say, if somebody wants to use this commercially, yes, this is the license I can issue to you, where they have a commercial license as well. 

So you need to have both the non-commercial license and a potential commercial license for commercial partners, which you can then offer to them and they can decide to buy or not. And if you’re set up to do that nicely, then this is absolutely sensible and this is a really good thing, but many people don’t understand it that way.

And so they may not even have the contributors agreements in place to be able to create that commercial license and all sorts of other things. And so it actually means that is less usable, more generally less scalable, because they’ve chosen a license without understanding what that means, what the implications of that are.

[00:13:55] Lucie: That’s people not taking the time to read up about it or that it’s actually quite difficult to find easy definitions.

[00:14:01] David: It’s actually quite difficult. And there’s a lot of misunderstandings in place within communities, and so there’s just bad advice going around, and yeah.

[00:14:11] Lucie: So there’s an opportunity there for somebody to create an easier way of understanding all this and navigating it.

[00:14:17] David: I do think that is something where, in a small way, we would like to contribute to that. But I think it is something where there’s a, there were bigger things at play related to this as to how should people be doing this and how they should fit together, which are beyond what an individual organization or group should do and more what we need to get communities engaged with and how we get communities engaged with that.

And so this is something where the existing communities engaging in this, and actually getting this information, sharing this in ways, or being able to share this in ways which I think are more powerful, is something which I think is important. And we come back then to this key thing about variants and back to the US communities that we engage with this, and there have been attempts in the past. But the way somebody recently phrased this to me is that nobody’s ever seen a system that works with variants.

[00:15:16] Lucie: What do you mean variants then? Do you mean different types of the same textbook?

[00:15:20] David: Yeah, exactly, in some sense. That, you know, what happens and what people know is that you have an author, or a set of authors who have a textbook, and they might have other people using it who might then become contributors back to the textbook. This is a really good thing, very positive, that because it’s open, other people can contribute. They can say I’ve built these worksheets, do you want to integrate them in? And the authors can decide, yes, I want to integrate them in, or no, I don’t want to integrate them in. 

But the context that we have in the West African region and other places is we, for example, would like a variant where the examples have been contextualized to be more relevant to a particular audience. We’re not wanting to change the actual textbook because the textbook itself is good for the global audience.

[00:16:08] Lucie: Yeah, the theory stays the same, but the actual practical examples, the way it’s actually perhaps introduced also even, that could change.

[00:16:16] David: And so within the other systems that would then become a fork. That would become something which is separated.

[00:16:24] Lucie: Yeah, you can have the whole sort of, you can have the sort of basic infrastructure, the same, like, the basics of text, or the theory, let’s say. And then just I guess like you do with the Open App Builder.

[00:16:34] David: In our context. It’s the same basic problem where the standard structures are set up to be able to say either you contribute back into the whole or you create something which is called a fork, which is totally separate and which duplicates, but is separate. And what we find is that actually that’s more responsibility than most people are willing to take on. Managing a fork is the same as being an author.

[00:17:03] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:17:04] David: And so really what we’re finding is that there’s a need for something different, which would be the sorts of variants of the textbook. To say that, somebody is not actually taking on the responsibility for the textbook as a whole and so on, that’s still the responsibility of the main author group. And now what they could be responsible for is a variant of it, which is different in a particular way.

So that’s the sort of, this is the fundamentally different idea, which is emerging. And it’s emerging as being really essential in some of these low resource environments because actually maintaining a fork, maintaining a whole textbook is a lot of work, and our partners there, taking on that work is too much to ask for them. 

But taking on the responsibility to manage a variant may be realistic and may serve their context much better. This is something where I actually believe this could be really powerful even in European, US context, all over, and not just for textbooks. But this idea of being able to really make multi-variant textbooks work, there’s all sorts of problems around this. For example, libraries like to be able to identify things, so they have unique identifiers. Whenever you create a new version, or you release a new version of a textbook, then it needs a new unique identifier. And so each unique, each new version of each new variant would need a new unique identifier. Now, one textbook now suddenly has lots of identifiers where they’re all referring to the same thing. 

So there are going to be issues when we come back to this, not in the low resource environment where the libraries aren’t really set up to deal with this, so it’s okay, but once we get back into doing this in high resource environments where your libraries are very well organized and well set up, we might need to work out what could this look like for another way of identifying, and identifying things in a slightly different way so that variants can be uniquely identified as associated. And so these are things where I don’t know, I don’t have the answers here. I do have thoughts on the answers.

[00:19:24] Lucie: Yeah, I’m sure you do, because it fits in with all the database conversations, I guess in a way.

[00:19:28] David: Absolutely. Exactly. And I’d love to engage with librarians, if we do build these systems outright, how can we be managing this in a way which changes how they do this? 

What’s really exciting, of course, is that you could have a variant, if you think about your library systems where, you know, one variant lives in the psychology part of this because it’s a psychology textbook and the other variant lives in your biology part, because it’s a biology, statistics for biologists and statistics for psychologists, they could be variants of the same statistics textbook, but they could actually be classified very differently.

These are things where there’s lots of beautiful complications that come in, where, I know I love that sort of complexity where this is actually thinking, how it might force us to think more deeply about some of these other systems. And from my perspective, done well, this could lead to both a simplification and an explosion at the same time, which is quite exciting because maybe you’d actually create less textbooks if you could be building the variants better, but you’d have many more variants than you would’ve had textbooks otherwise. This is what I mean by both a simplification and an explosion.

[00:20:48] Lucie: I think people like textbooks. I think everyone would make their own anyway, just like they do now.

[00:20:53] David: No, I think, well, I’m not saying that there won’t be people who want to take on the responsibility of writing their own textbook, there always will, and that’ll be great. But I am saying that I think there may be people who would otherwise have written their own textbook who decide, actually, I don’t need a textbook, I just need a variant of this. 

[00:21:15] Lucie: But then, in order to, for that, you also would need to change how sort of academia is respected, the whole sort of system around that.

[00:21:22] David: Exactly that recognition that would come from a successful variant of a textbook might need to be similar to the recognition that would come from a successful textbook. So these, it is wonderful, this is changing potentially academic systems, recognition, you know, so this is why in a high resource environment, this is really complex. Whereas, in a low resource environment, the need is just so much greater and you don’t have these well established systems around textbook authors. These things are not built into promotion structures, they’re not, so all of that’s more flexible anyway. And so actually building these structures in as, at the moment, having textbook authoring as part of your promotion criteria isn’t really on the radar for Kenyan academics. I know, I’ve been involved in those processes. 

Whereas, it would be relatively simple to imagine that actually if you were managing, responsible for a variant of a textbook that could be recognized, if a number of lecturers started doing that, the fact that it could be recognized and built into the promotion criteria is absolutely reasonable, it’s a public facing role, which you can clearly articulate the work that you’ve done, it’s very visible, especially if this is managed in the open communities through GitHub. Somebody can actually quality control this in really concrete ways. 

And so I could imagine quite quickly that being recognized as part of promotion criteria within, for example, the Kenyan context, or maybe even more importantly within the West African ECOWAS region, where have this sort of centralized process for promotion, and so you could actually have something like this entering into that centralized process, I think, in quite a concrete way, which would be serving both the lecturers and the system, and therefore happening at scale across a whole West African region because they already have this centralized career progression process. Whereas it’s not centralized in Kenya in the same way, it’s more university level, it’s decentralized. 

It’s really interesting to see and think, well, in these different contexts, what are these opportunities and how do these then interact with this and where could get ahead. I love the fact that it’s possible that the West African region could actually get ahead in terms of thinking of recognizing authors of variants, because it serves them in their context. 

At the moment, there isn’t much textbook authoring happening. There is a bit, but it’s the sort of thing where actually taking an international textbook and contextualizing it to Benin or Burkina Faso or Niger, that would be something which would be recognized. People would value that and it would be recognized, and therefore it could get put into the promotion criteria, which means it’s incentivized. It’s not just recognized, it’s incentivized. This is really important and great.

[00:24:28] Lucie: Yeah. Yeah. It’s lovely to see you so passionate about it, David. You’re passionate about many things, but clearly this is really something that is a driving force for you.

[00:24:37] David: It’s something where, having been embedded in these systems and seeing both the opportunity, but the challenge, how difficult it is, and the fact that there are amazing people working in, really, environments that from the outside are just unimaginable.

The work, the teaching load, what’s expected in different ways, it’s really challenging. But turning that around and making that an opportunity for the people who are serious, and they exist, and there are many people who are not serious as well, I don’t want to roast at this, there are many people who are playing the system, and so on, as in every system.

[00:25:20] Lucie: Everywhere. Yep.

[00:25:21] David: Everywhere. But there are people who are so driven and passionate about actually the work they do, making a difference in their context. And the fact that we can actually align these existing incentive structures, like promotion, potentially, with activities that would really help the education of their students, and so on, this is something which, yeah, I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. 

And it’s great, really, for the first time, I believe it’s 15 years of understanding, learning, trying, reiterating, understanding constraints, and I’m really excited by some of the things that are happening right now and where I think we could see in the next few years a system, not just a system, but tools and processes emerging, which just allow people to excel in these low resource environments, creating things which are really useful. And we’re seeing the Kenyan teams doing this with these textbooks and what they’re doing there, I’m very excited about that work.

[00:26:33] Lucie: Yeah. Great. Thank you very much for the discussion, David.

[00:26:35] David: No, thank you.