Students have a textbook problem. They’re too expensive. Flat world knowledge has an idea. They make textbooks free to read online. For a fraction of the cost of a normal textbook, you can purchase the books in soft cover, audio or even print it yourself. Most of the textbooks are currently business text books, many of which are yet to be released, but there are already over 400 classes prescribing these texts as reading material.

All books are released under a creative commons license which allows anyone to modify and redistribute the text as long as it’s published under the same license and the original authors are acknowledged. Following the trend in software development, this makes the textbooks ‘open source’. Related is an article by Scientific America about the successfulness of open source text books so far.

The open-source dream got a new boost in May, when Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger, responding to his state’s budget crisis, asked content developers to submit their “open-source digital textbooks” to California Learning Resource Network (CLRN).

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While the real power of open-source textbooks, Bridges and others say, is being able to tap into the knowledge of the nation’s 3 million schoolteachers, a look at the recent crop of books suggests that’s not an accurate reflection of how educational content is being created. So far, the front-runners were typically written by just one or several authors, and the one major organization that has fully embraced a Wiki approach failed to impress CLRN reviewers.

Looks like there will be big changes to the higher education sector over the next couple decades. Even if there are problems with open source textbooks, the “Edupunks” will continue to drive this education 2.0 movement. Fast Company has a interesting article about this.

Is a college education really like a string quartet? [...] If you want to perform a proper string quartet, you can’t cut out the cellist nor can you squeeze in more performances by playing the music faster. But that was then — before MP3s and iPods proved just how freely music could flow.

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The edupunks are on the march. From VC-funded startups to the ivied walls of Harvard, new experiments and business models are springing up from entrepreneurs, professors, and students alike. Want a class that’s structured like a role-playing game? An accredited bachelor’s degree for a few thousand dollars? A free, peer-to-peer Wiki university? These all exist today, the overture to a complete educational remix.

The article is 4 pages long, and I would highly recommend it if you’re interested in higher education reform. They conclude with

The transformation of education may happen faster than we realize. However futuristic it may seem, what we’re living through is an echo of the university’s earliest history. Universitas doesn’t mean campus, or class, or a particular body of knowledge; it means the guild, the group of people united in scholarship. The university as we know it was born around AD 1100, when communities formed in Bologna, Italy; Oxford, England; and Paris around a scarce, precious information technology: the handwritten book. Illuminated manuscripts of the period show a professor at a podium lecturing from a revered volume while rows of students sit with paper and quill — the same basic format that most classes take 1,000 years later.

Today, we’ve gone from scarcity of knowledge to unimaginable abundance. It’s only natural that these new, rapidly evolving information technologies would convene new communities of scholars, both inside and outside existing institutions. The string-quartet model of education is no longer sustainable. The university of the future can’t be far away.

Entrepreneur and software developer Bruce Eckel expressed some of his thoughts about the edupunk movement as a part of a post about examples of “upside down thinking”

If you’ve been to college, you know that colleges, professors and textbook publishers collude to create an artificial economy to extract more money from the students (usually, their parents). The fact that such behaviour is institutionalized is an early indicator that something is wrong. Add to that the research granting system whereby a university takes half or more of the money granted to a professor for the privilege of being associated with the institution. And what most students have observed is that researchers don’t make the best teachers, even though they are typically forced to also teach, a task that is often relegated to graduate students.

Colleges and universities can get away with this kind of behaviour because they’ve fixed the game. For success in life, the story goes, you need to go to a college or university, and the reputation of the institution will get you a better job and higher pay. Of course, what an employer really wants is someone who can figure things out and is unafraid of taking risks. Does going to an expensive university guarantee this, or are you even more likely to find a go-getter by seeing who has paid their own way through a community college and then a state university?

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Take just one thing: the eyes-forward nature of most classes. Again and again, studies show that lecturing is just about the worst way to transfer information. But by controlling the game, institutions don’t need to change. The Edupunk movement is going to use the Internet to route around the roadblock of traditional learning, and (as is so often the case) the colleges and universities will be playing catch-up to whatever emerges.

You can read the rest of it here.

Technology is changing education in a similar way to how it’s changing the music industry. It’s getting rid of the publishers by connecting content creators directly with consumers. Record labels arose in the mid 20th century because musicians had a distribution problem while music fans had a music scarcity problem. Record companies solved both those problems simultaneously by recording and distributing music to every corner of the developed world in the form of a physical media from records to cassette tapes to CDs. Physical media has a high barrier of entry, so for a long time, a few record companies had a monopoly over the music industry.

Record companies took advantage of this and sometimes even took a majority of the revenue in sales from the artists. Artists had to use record companies for distribution because it was too expensive to do it themselves. As a result, the few musicians that were popular enough to make money became more popular because they could spend more money on distribution while independent artists struggle to survive. The emergence of the Internet as a content medium is flattening the playing field. Indie bands like radio head have been very successful at delivering their music online straight to their fans, no record labels involved. Itunes allowed fans to purchase a single song rather than an entire album, it allows potential patrons to get a sample of the music before purchasing. Independent artists can publish songs at a much lower cost than through traditional distributors.

Binding and distribution of textbooks is the high barrier of entry in the education industry today. We’re seeing the early signs of the digital revolution in education, no doubt it will go through similar stages as the music industry with resistance from distributors, but sooner or later resisting the trend will become too expensive and only those embracing the new form of education will survive. It’s good to see some real competition to the inefficient institutionalized education we have today.