Utah Schools Adopting Open Source Textbooks

Schools in the state of Utah are migrating from traditional textbooks to electronic, open source textbooks.

State Superintenent Larry Shumway has said this will allow schools to keep their textbooks up to date and save money.

The Utah Department of Education is developing textbooks in Science, Math, and Language. The average cost for each copy will be about $5 for the new open source textbooks, compared with an average cost of $80 for conventional textbooks for the state’s K-12 schools.

The textbooks will be written and verified by expert authors, and since they’re open source, will be available for anyone to use and build upon, not just in Utah public schools.

Utah is not the only state experimenting with open source textbooks. California state senator Darell Steinberg is pushing a plan to develop textbooks for the state’s universities and community colleges.

Like the Utah plan, it’s an attempt to reign in out-of-control costs for textbooks. A popular political science text costs $169.70. A widely-adopted biology textbook costs over $200. A California undergraduate will expect to pay around $5,000 in textbook costs before receiving a degree.

Steinberg’s plan would require an investment of $25 million but would save students $1 billion in textbook fees. They would either use e-readers to read them or pay $20 for a hard copy, a far cry from the triple-digit prices college textbooks usually command.

The 20 Million Minds Foundation, also known as 20MM, recently released an open source statistics textbook, “Collaborative Statistics 2nd Edition,” intended for use in community colleges and universities, much like the plan for California’s textbooks. The text is available on PDF and contains interactive exercises and graphics to help introductory statistics students learn the concepts. The 20MM group says the book’s quality is on par with conventional textbooks on the market.