Open Business Model

   

In the Open Business Modules topic, there are two sub topics: OCW and Open Textbook  

Open Courseware

The MIT Open Course Ware has become a model for universities that are interested in promoting their courses online. In the A Sustainable Model for Open Courseware Development (Johansen & Wiley, 2010) article, the authored described the question for offering OCW in BYU and I think these questions can be adopted by all institutes that are thinking about offering OCW. The questions are: How much is the cost, How will it affect paid enrollment, and How to continue the OCW initiative. Although the study from BYU provides encouraging evidence that OpenCourseWare programs can be conducted in a financially self-sustaining manner. There are still questions on the dropout rate and how students are encouraged by the OCW before they enrolled.

There are different universities providing their courses online as OCW for sharing and promoting reasons. MIT stated that when they first designed the OCW, the target audience was faculty members but they found out that there are more students than faculty members visiting the site. That’s the reason they released MITx, which is more students oriented. Therefore, when designing the college based OCW, we need to think about who the audience are. If we want to focus on students, one element we need to add is the assessment piece. When I was browsing MIT OCW as a student, I found myself wanting to find assessments and quizzes to measure what I have learned but was not able to.  

Online Textbook

Flat World Knowledge is one of the biggest online textbook publishers in US. Hilton and Wiley’s (2010) article “A sustainable future for open textbooks? The Flat World Knowledge story” has detailed descriptions and comparisons between the Flat World Knowledge and Textbook Media’s pricing policy and copyright authority. When reading articles from Wiley and other blogs on Digital Textbooks, we can identify two biggest advantages of digital textbook: 1. Making reading more cost efficient and mobile friendly, 2. Making printing & publication easier.  

Making reading more cost efficient and mobile

With the growth of digital readers (iPad, Kindle, etc.) the Digital Textbook Sale in US grew from 1% (2010) to 5.5% (2012), and it’s predicted to grow to 18.8% by 2014 (http://www.dclab.com/blog/2012/03/digital-textbooks-whats-stopping-us/). And over 70% students are eager to stop using printed textbook and move to digital ones for cost and convenience (e.g., textbooks are heavy to carry, you can’t study if you forgot to bring the textbooks, etc.) factors (http://www.schools.com/visuals/digital-textbooks.html).
When we talked about Open Education, digital textbook is one of the topics that fall among with it and there are universities that have been trying digital textbooks. Indiana University and Pearson are working together to reduce the costs of digital textbooks for students on all IU campuses. IU's eTexts initiative enables faculty to optionally choose these digital textbooks and online exercises at reduced prices for students. Many universities have international program, which students oversea are taking classes from US universities. Digital textbooks are especially useful in international program, when oversea students need to purchase foreign textbooks; the price goes up even higher because of the shipping fee. Using digital textbook became a much better option in this case.  

Making printing & publication easier

Nowadays printing and publishing is much easier than ancient time, here is a link about how Chinese created type http://www.teleread.com/paul-biba/chinese-invented-movable-type-600-years-before-gutenberg/. But printing and publication can be even much easier via digital books. In Hilton & Wiley’s (2010) article “Free: Why authors are giving books away on the internet”, the interview results showed that authors who using free digital distribution of their books believe offering free books online actually stimulate the print sales, because free distribution increase exposure and visibility of their works and extend the long tail of their books. Also, more people will read their books. There are multiple ways for authors to make money besides sell books, with the increase of exposure, chances like new books or advertisement can come along. Therefore, offering free digital books is a win-win situation.