An Open Letter to Foothill-De
Anza Faculty Members
inviting your participation in a higher education revolution
 |
Spring 2004
Dear Foothill-De Anza Faculty Member:
As you may know, in response to my request the Foothill-De Anza Board of Trustees
recently asked Chancellor Martha Kanter and her staff to begin work on formulating
a new FHDA policy to help reduce the cost of college textbooks while maintaining
full protection for academic freedom and the highest possible academic standards.
The specific goal of this proposed new policy is to support and encourage the
development and use of public domain-based learning materials
as well as materials that use custom intellectual property licenses provided
by Creative Commons as substitutes for costly textbooks.
I invite your help in formulating this proposed new policy,
which is currently being developed. In fact, as a faculty member your participation
will largely determine whether this proposed new policy succeeds or fails. That's
why I have written this open letter to you. I want to make sure you understand
my proposal, know what the Board is contemplating, and solicit your advice and
assistance to ensure that we move foward together in the smartest, most strategic
and inclusive way possible.
Here is why this topic is so important right now:
College textbook costs have been rising gradually for years and have now, in many cases, reached levels that are truly unconscionable. At the beginning of each quarter, one can see students combing through our campus bookstores to find out how much books cost for different classes, information they then use to make course selection decisions. The high cost of books, more than any other single expense imposed by our system, often dictates how rapidly or slowing a financially disadvantaged student can proceed with their college education. When I was a poor student attending Foothill College some twenty-five years ago, I made many similar visits to our bookstores, trips that concluded in one painful decision after another about which classes I could afford to take. That should not be the way access-minded community colleges operate, particularly when other attractive options are emerging, which, thankfully, is now the case.
It is true that some scholarship funds are available to help financially disadvantaged students cope with high textbook costs. But many students are reluctant to apply for that aid, there is not nearly enough to meet all needs, and funds used for that purpose are not available to help students in other, more direct ways.
By contrast, moving forward to develop public domain and Creative Commons-based learning materials will do much more than just help financially hard-pressed students save money. Even more important, as we succeed (or perhaps fail, as we learn how to do this) we will also contribute to the development of a process that will over time create an enormously valuable new set of academic resources for college students and other motivated learners both here in California and around the world.
I've made this proposal after consultations with community and business leaders
because I see it as a next step we can take in the continuum of educational
access long championed by those who support community colleges. It represents
another way our District can advance our shared goal of providing more accessible
higher educational opportunities. That has always been the guiding mission of
the public community college system.
I want to emphasize three things at the outset of this policy development process.
First, my proposal does not envision our Board enacting any policies that would require faculty members to participate in developing or using public domain or Creative Commons-based learning materials. Once enacted, the new Board policy would merely guide our administration in providing incentives and support to faculty members who want to move in this new direction, as some already are.
Second, if approved and enacted by the Board my proposal would insure that faculty members do not lose any rights they currently enjoy related to the publication of scholarly materials, including royalty payments and other forms of income.
Third, the overall goal of this proposed new policy is to create incentives and support to encourage our faculty to organize and maintain existing public domain-based resources and learning materials bearing Creative Commons intellectual property licenses as substitutes for costly textbooks and to do so, if possible, in ways that create new revenue opportunities for our faculty and district.
I've put together a FAQ (frequently asked questions) about the potential role
the Foothill-De Anza Community College District and faculty can play in helping
students gain access to this potentially exciting and empowering new set of
affordable, high-quality learning materials, which you will find here.
In summary, the Foothill-De Anza Community College District is Silicon Valley's
leading institution of higher education. Over the years, our two colleges have
provided more opportunities to more students than all other local colleges combined.
Our proximity to the world's best minds in technology and education gives us
a special chance to lead in an area that will further break down economic barriers
to higher education and reduce an escalating cost that holds many eager learners
back. We can preserve and extend our District's reputation for excellence and
innovation by becoming the first community college district in the nation to
adopt a formal policy specifically designed to take advantage of this new opportunity.
I hope and trust this proposal will have your support.
Your views are critically important to me. I welcome and invite your critique. Please let me know if you support this idea, and feel free to offer suggestions or feedback, including any objections or concerns, or ways in which this policy proposal can be improved. Send your comments to me at: hplotkin@plotkin.com.
You have my deep respect and appreciation for all your efforts on behalf of our students.
Sincerely,
Hal Plotkin
Member, Foothill-De Anza Governing Board of Trustees.
Public Domain Opportunities for the Foothill- De Anza Community College District
What are public domain-based learning materials?
What are the permissible uses of public domain materials?
What is the primary goal of this
proposed new policy? Is it to reduce the costs of textbooks? To get faculty
members to organize freely available public domain materials for use in their
classes? To create incentives for faculty to place their own publications into
the public domain? To use Creative Commons Licenses? Or to encourage new ways
of publishing and sharing scholarly work?
How can the use of public domain
materials reduce the costs imposed on students and at the same time create a
new revenue stream for faculty members and for our district?
Will faculty members need to know a lot about technology or computer programming to participate?
How will this project get started?
Can faculty members at Foothill
or De Anza work in teams or with colleagues at other institutions to create
these materials (i.e., shared authorship)?
What are the goals in terms of the
final cost to end users (that is, students) for these materials?
What might a new Foothill-De Anza
Policy on Public Domain Learning Materials look like?
Is this an appropriate way to be spending
the district's resources during a time of very tight budgets?
Where will the district come up with the money to do this?
What can I do as a faculty member at Foothill or De Anza to help get this policy enacted?
Public Domain Opportunities for the Foothill- De Anza Community College District
"Public domain" is a legal phrase that describes intellectual works that are no longer owned by anyone. The dawn of the Internet has made it much easier to discover, archive, combine and re-purpose this material.
Public domain material includes hundreds of thousands of works whose copyrights have expired or not been renewed, including books, articles, maps, scientific papers, films, plays, songs, etc. Many of literature's best known works are in the public domain, as are many of the most significant early scientific papers and manuscripts.
For a variety of reasons, authors of intellectual property are also increasingly placing their new or current works directly into the public domain. The best known example of this trend may be the OpenCourseWare program initiated by MIT President Charles Vest that encouraged MIT faculty members to put the material they use in their classes into the public domain for free online use by others. This includes textbooks and/or their equivalents in some cases, as well as streaming video of class lectures in others. The amount of public domain academic material available online has recently exploded, with more being added each day.
Many of these innovative educators and authors are using free, custom intellectual property licenses provided by Creative Commons. These materials are not in the public domain. Instead, the licenses provided by Creative Commons, which are electronically attached to each document, establish the ownership of those materials and enable their authors to define the conditions under which they can be used by others. One of the goals of Creative Commons is to create a commons of intellectual property that is available for everyone to use under pre-defined conditions. A new marketplace of ideas, if you will.
What is Creative Commons?
Creative Commons is a two-year old local non-profit organization established
by Stanford Law School Professor and author Larry Lessig that provides free,
easy to use, customizable intellectual property (IP) licenses to the owners
of materials that might otherwise be copyrighted. One version of these free
IP licenses, for example, establishes the ownership of the materials but also
allows others to use those materials online without any charge while requiring
royalty payments if those materials are printed or sold. Another custom Creative
Commons IP license allows free use of materials for any purpose as long as the
original author receives credit. Creative Commons licenses are XML formatted
and machine-readable, which means it will soon be possible to do a search on,
say, a math tutorial that can be used without charge if the author is credited,
and receive results that correspond with that request. Additional free IP licenses,
with other custom features and related supporting services, are currently being
developed by Creative Commons in response to user demand, including demand from
the higher education community. The Executive Director of Creative Commons,
Glenn Brown, recently met with the Foothill-De Anza Board to provide a briefing
on public doman, the progam and goals of Creative Commons, and related current
opportunities in higher education.
What are public domain-based learning materials?
“Public Domain-Based Learning Materials” include materials derived from existing public domain resources. Examples include an introductory geometry textbook, a basic physics textbook, a chemistry textbook, and anthologies of great literature, philosophy, and dramatic and artistic works. Public domain-based learning materials may or may not also contain other supporting materials, such as related tests, other learning assessment tools and study guides.
What are the permissible uses of public domain materials?
The permissible uses of public domain and quasi-public domain materials vary.
As noted above, in some cases the original owners of these materials have
imposed
restrictions that permit free personal use but do not allow any commercial
uses. In other instances, such as with materials whose copyrights have expired
or
where those rights have been voluntarily given up, there are no restrictions
on the reuse and repurposing of the materials. (See, for example, the list
of
free public domain educational modules
currently being assembled by Rice University's Connexions Project, which is
just one of many public domain repositories currently under construction.).
What is the role of faculty in deciding how or when to use or develop public-domain or Creative Commons-based learning materials?
Decisions about publishing and textbook selection are and must remain, fundamentally, choices of the faculty. The District can provide encouragement, training, support and incentives that help faculty members continue to implement whatever learning methodologies they deem best suited to their particular situation. Once successful programs are in place that facilitate the development and use of public domain and Creative Commons-based learning materials faculty will gain an additional set of options.
What is the primary goal of this proposed new policy? Is it to reduce the costs of textbooks? To get faculty members to organize freely available public domain materials for use in their classes? To create incentives for faculty to place their own publications into the public domain? To use Creative Commons Licenses? Or to encourage new ways of publishing and sharing scholarly work?
All of the above. The overall goal and motivation of this new policy, however, is to reduce the costs of textbooks while maintaining high standards. Not every faculty member will want to participate in this activity, nor will every faculty member want to do so in the exact same way. The goal is to create a flexible policy along with a variety of options that will serve the needs of any faculty member who wants to help create or use a new generation of high-quality, low-cost learning materials. Repurposing existing public domain or Creative Commons material is one excellent new way to accomplish this objective, but it is not the only way.
How can the use of public domain materials reduce the costs imposed on students and at the same time create a new revenue stream for faculty members and for our district?
There are many ways that this could be accomplished. A faculty member or group of faculty members could, for example, make a new public domain-based textbook available online for free use while offering a different printer ready file (one that is formatted properly for printing) for sale at a modest cost, say $3 to $5 a copy. Imagine how many students and schools around the world might be interested in a current, up-to-date high quality college level text in your discipline that costs under $5. Volume sales of these materials to students around the world could generate considerable sums as this new model begins to compete with current proprietary textbook publishing methods.
What sort of incentives do you envision creating for faculty members who might be interested in developing or maintaining public domain-based learning materials as substitutes for costly textbooks?
The Board of Trustees sets policies and goals for our district and usually does not address the specific methods that are used to achieve those goals. That's one reason the participation of faculty members at this stage is so essential. Once our Board of Trustees approves this policy, Chancellor Martha Kanter and her staff will consult with district faculty and staff to develop the specific incentive and support programs needed to accomplish this objective. These incentives might, for example, include sabbatical study to develop public domain materials, reassigned time, grant support or stipend support for involved faculty, technical support in locating, developing and maintaining public domain-based and Creative Commons online materials, marketing support for those materials once assembled, and any other business services that may be needed. Additional suggestions for workable incentives are welcome and solicited.
How will any revenues derived from the publication of public domain-based learning materials be divided between the faculty authors and the district?
In most early cases, faculty members are voluntarily forgoing royalties in
the interest of achieving the widest possible circulation of the materials.
It's also possible the
district may act as a publisher or, alternatively, it may enter into
an agreement with a third party to provide those services. In some cases, the
district and
faculty may need to work out suitable revenue-sharing arrangements that
take into account the faculty member's ownership of their own intellectual
property
while also acknowledging the district's role in supporting the creation, maintenance
and distribution of these works. Models to sustain these efforts are needed,
along with pilot projects.
The Faculty Association and other similar groups have long opposed "work
for hire" arrangements. What benefits will a faculty member receive in
exchange for sharing — with the district — royalty rights to any
public domain or Creative Commons-based materials they may organize or produce?
The answer to this question will have to be negotiated over time to the
satisfaction of the faculty. Presently, however, no work for hire arrangements
are contemplated. The faculty would retain full ownership rights over any public-domain
or Creative Commons materials they may assemble or produce. Potentially, and
if desired, faculty members could enter into annual or multi-year scholarly
publishing contracts with the District in exchange for what I hope will be a
growing menu of enabling services designed to support the production and distribution
of high-quality public domain and Creative Commons-based academic learning materials.
Faculty members are always free to pursue other publishing avenues. This policy
is designed to give faculty members one new option, not take take away or preclude
any options they currently enjoy.
What happens if a faculty member does not want to participate in the creation or use of public domain-based learning materials?
Absolutely nothing. On the other hand, one way faculty members will distinguish themselves in the future is by becoming known as a steward of the best set of public domain-based learning materials in their discipline. As such, faculty members who participate will create new opportunities for their own professional advancement and development and enhance their academic reputations. Faculty members are under no obligation to take advantage of this opportunity.
Will faculty members need to know a lot about technology or computer programming to participate?
No. Ideally, if we proceed, our district will seek or locate the funding it
needs to develop technical support services so that interested and involved
faculty members can devote their primary attention to the task of identifying
and organizing public domain-based materials that are suitable for their subject
areas.
Do all academic disciplines lend themselves equally to
the production of new public domain or Creative Commons-based learning materials?
No. In some disciplines (economics comes to mind) generating useful public domain learning materials will be more difficult than in other areas where there is already a greater abundance of available public domain and Creative Commons resources, such as in the hard sciences (math, chemistry, physics), language arts and creative arts. There is no academic discipline, however, where motivated faculty members would be unable to make a significant new contribution to their fields by organizing and maintaining currently existing public domain materials.
What if standard textbooks are really the best materials that can be used to teach my class? What if I am convinced that my students' best interests would not be served by relying on public domain or Creative Commons-based materials?
Faculty members should make whatever decisions they feel
are in the best interests of their students. One factor that many instructors
consider is the cost of the materials they require their students to purchase,
which can determine how accessible their class is to the diverse groups served
by a community college. At a minimum, it is reasonable to hope that all faculty
members will be interested in reviewing current information about the public
domain and Creative Commons-based materials available for use in their classes
and that this information will be considered when making textbook and learning
material selections.
If the movement toward the creation of new public
domain and Creative Commons-based learning materials constitutes a new "revolution"
in higher education — won't everyone soon be doing it? If so, why should
the Foothill-De Anza Community College District bother to get involved? What
will make our effort in this area succeed?
Revolutions don't happen all by themselves. They are led. The Foothill-De
Anza Community College District has long been a leader in developing new ways
to bring high-quality educational opportunites to ever-larger and more diverse
segments of our population. This proposed new policy continues that tradition.
Like some other previous innovative efforts, it may fail — in which case
much will be learned. Additionally, scholars at other higher education institutions
may, in the end, win the competition to create the best new sets of public domain
or Creative Commons-based learning materials suitable for community college
students — and create the best new set of support services and conditions
that lead to their creation. Either way, though, local residents will benefit
directly from any steps our district takes that hasten the development of more
affordable learning materials. The Foothill-De Anza Community College District's
proximity to Silicon Valley also provides significant advantages that make the
successful development of next-generation learning materials more likely here
than in many other areas.
How will this project get started?
The Board will rely on the Chancellor and her staff to develop a program in
consultation with the Academic Senate that advances these goals, which may include
a test or pilot effort that involves the most interested faculty members.
Can faculty members at Foothill or De Anza work in teams
or with colleagues at other institutions to create these materials (i.e., shared
authorship)?
That certainly is one option.
What are the goals in terms of the final cost to end users (that is, students) for these materials?
One overall goal is to reduce the costs currently imposed on students by required textbook purchases. Given the potential economies of scale, it's conceivable that substantial revenues could be generated by high-quality, low-cost textbook substitutes. Personally, I would like to see the cost per volume limited to $5 or less.
What might a new Foothill-De Anza Policy on Public Domain Learning Materials look like?
I have drafted a sample policy as a starting point for discussions with the
district's participatory governance groups. This document is intended to get
our discussions started in hopes of improving the language it contains. It is
not a finished document. You can find a copy of this initial policy draft here.
Is this an appropriate way to be spending the district's resources during a
time of very tight budgets?
In recent months, interest among policy makers and the general public
in public domain and Creative Commons-based learning materials has been exploding,
in large measure, precisely because of tight education budgets. Many members
of the public are asking hard questions about whether public institutions of
higher education are using the resources at their disposal in the most efficient
ways possible to serve the public interest. That includes taking advantage of
new opportunities created by recent advances in technology. One of the ways
the Foothill-De Anza Community College District has traditionally won support
from the local community is by pioneering new ways to make higher education
more accessible and affordable. By enacting a new policy to create incentives
for the faculty to use and produce public domain and Creative Commons-based
learning materials we will be contining that tradition.
Where will the district come up with the money to do this?
Many leading foundations are now focusing on this area. Top foundation leaders
recognize the opportunity they have to fund the creation of a new set of affordable
educational resources as a smart long-term investment. Generally speaking, programs
of this sort are often preferred over efforts that meet a one-time need. As
such, funding to create public domain and Creative Commons-based learning materials
is growing rapidly, with most of that money going to the groups, organizations
and institutions that are leading the way. Precise funding mechanisms remain
to be determined, but the district is likely to pursue a combination of public,
private and philanthropic support.
What can I do as a faculty member at Foothill or De Anza to help get this policy enacted?
You can offer your support by suggesting any changes or ideas that may be useful. My fellow Trustees will also be more inclined to move forward with this idea once it has received the formal support of the Academic Senate on both campuses.
Draft Foothill-De Anza Policy on Public Domain Learning Materials for Discussion Purposes
The Foothill-De Anza Community College District encourages the creation, use, and ongoing maintenance of public domain-based learning materials in accordance with established curriculum standards for educational purposes of the district.
The goals of this policy are to provide students with high quality learning materials that reside in the public domain to augment and/or replace costly textbooks, to create sustainable academic resources for students, faculty and staff, and to provide opportunities for professional growth of district employees involved in these activities.
The Chancellor will provide periodic reports, not less than annually, to the Board that detail the progress made toward accomplishing the goals delineated by this policy.
-end- 9//01/2004