|
 |
Wired
The Radical Transformation of the Textbook
Brian Barrett
FOR SEVERAL DECADES, textbook publishers followed the same basic model:
Pitch a hefty tome of knowledge to faculty for inclusion in lesson
plans; charge students an equally hefty sum; revise and update its
content as needed every few years. Repeat. But the last several years
have seen a shift at colleges and universities—one that has more
recently turned tectonic.
In a way, the evolution of the textbook has mirrored that in every
other industry. Ownership has given way to rentals, and analog to
digital. Within the broad strokes of that transition, though, lie
divergent ideas about not just what learning should look like in the
21st century but how affordable to make it.
Let’s Get Digital
Pearson is one of the biggest publishers of educational books in the
world, with a roster of 1,500 textbooks in the US market. Last month,
it announced that going forward it would adopt a “digital first”
strategy. It’ll still produce physical textbooks, but students will
rent by default with the option to buy after the rental period ends.
“Our job is to provide the very best content with the very best
learning outcomes at the very best prices for students that we can,”
says Pearson CEO John Fallon. “This model enables us to do that.”
It also enables Pearson to staunch the bleeding caused by an explosion
in the second-hand market. A company called Chegg launched the first
major online textbook rental service in 2007; Amazon followed suit in
2012. Both advertise savings of up to 90 percent off the sticker price.
And that’s just two examples. In fact, the market has spent the last
decade in something of an unvirtuous circle. As students flock to more
affordable options, textbook prices have skyrocketed to make up for the
lost revenue. The price of textbooks has increased 183 percent over the
last 20 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“Students started to reject the expensive textbooks. What they did,
since they had no other choice, was find ways to save money on
textbooks,” says Michael Hansen, CEO of educational publisher Cengage.
“The volumes of textbooks publishers were selling declined rapidly for
years. However, they always had this magical price lever. They could
always just increase the prices, so their revenue looked relatively
stable.”
The major publishers are publicly traded companies, under pressure to
demonstrate constant growth. Pearson’s digital-first strategy is a
significant step toward a more sustainable business model. Under the
new system, ebooks will cost an average of $40. Those who prefer actual
paper can pay $60 for the privilege of a rental, with the option to
purchase the book at the end of the term. The price of a new print
textbook can easily reach into the hundreds of dollars; under
digital-first, students have to actively want to pay that much after a
course is already over, making it an unlikely option for most.
The benefits to Pearson are self-evident. More than half of its revenue
comes from digital already; this move accelerates that transition,
while providing substantial savings in printing overhead. It also helps
nudge faculty toward using Pearson’s digital platforms, which for $79
offer an array of ancillary features like homework plans and assessment
tools along with access to the book.
Students stand to gain, as well. In addition to costing less than their
physical counterparts, digital textbooks take up less space, and
they’ll get more frequent updates. “Up until now the product
development cycle and the revision cycle were still driven by
essentially the way the world has been the last 40 years,” Fallon says.
“From now on all updates will be digital first. If there’s a scientific
breakthrough, a compelling business case study, developments in
contemporary politics or world events, you don’t need to wait three
years. You can, from one semester to another, update content.”
That applies also to updates around not just what people learn, but how
they learn it. As new research comes out around efficacy in education,
Pearson’s digital textbooks and related platforms can adjust in kind.
Fallon points to an upcoming Pearson app called Aida, which uses
machine learning—what else—to provide personalized feedback for
learning calculus.
“What the use of reinforced learning does is enable the machine to
respond in a much more adaptive, personal way to your needs. That
doesn’t mean you no longer need the lectures—you do,” Fallon says.
“Both approaches have a role to play. But technology allows you to
unleash and combine them to better effect.”
But more technology doesn't always mean better results. Within K-12
learning environments, the digital divide meansthat students in
low-income and rural households have less access to reliable internet
and fewer connected devices on which to complete the online portions of
their homework. And while Pearson's initiative applies only to
textbooks in higher ed, the shift to digital has implications at the
collegiate level as well.
“We are finding that even though undergraduates prefer to read
digitally, these preferences aren’t actually showing positive or even
equalness in terms of effect on comprehension,” says Lauren Singer
Trakhman, who studies reading comprehension at the University of
Maryland’s Disciplined and Learning Research Laboratory. “When it comes
to things like pulling details, key facts, numbers, and figures,
participants are doing a lot better after reading in print.”
Not only do students retain less when reading digitally, Trakhman says,
they’re more likely to overestimate how well they comprehended the
material. And that’s before you take into account that students reading
a textbook on a device do so amid a barrage of notifications that pull
them away from the material. Even without those additional
distractions, which Trakhman rules out in her research, students read
more quickly and less deeply. They reread sentences less. And even when
an ebook layout mimics that of a physical textbook, they move around
the page less, potentially missing important diagrams, sidebars, or
other supporting materials.
“Digital text, digital work, is often engaged with at a lower level of
attention. By moving everything online, it’s going to become even more
decontextualized. Overall, I think there’s going to be less deeper
learning going on,” Trakhman says. “I believe there’s a time and a
place for digital, but educators need to be mindful of the time and
place for using these resources. Rolling out these digital suites is
not really the best for student learning.”
Open Enrollment
Pearson’s digital-first initiative will dramatically bring down
textbook costs on average, albeit by phasing out the concept of
ownership. But increasingly, colleges are embracing textbooks that cost
… nothing.
Just as traditional software has a thriving open source community,
textbooks have Open Educational Resources, complete textbooks that
typically come free of charge digitally, or for a small fee—enough to
cover the printing—in hard copy. And while it’s not an entirely new
concept, OER has gained momentum in recent years, particularly as
support has picked up at an institutional level, rather than on a
course by course basis. According to a 2018 Babson College survey,
faculty awareness of OER jumped from 34 percent to 46 percent since
2015.
One of OER’s leading proponents is OpenStax, a nonprofit based out of
Rice University that offers a few dozen free textbooks, covering
everything from AP Biology to Principles of Accounting. In the
2019–2020 academic year, 2.7 million students across 6,600 institutions
used an OpenStax product instead of a for-profit equivalent.
The knock against OER is that, well, you get what you pay for. “One
faculty member told me only half-jokingly, that OER is like a puppy
that’s free. You get the free puppy, but then you have to do all the
work,” says Cengage’s Hansen, who argues that traditional publishers
provide critical supporting materials, like assessment questions, that
OER often lacks, and can push more regular updates.
But OpenStax editor-in-chief David Harris brushes off those dismissals.
“We go to the same author pools that the publishers go to,” Harris
says. “We put our authors through an extensive evaluation process. When
they start working on the project, we have an extensive peer review
process. You can’t shortcut that. We resemble a traditional publisher
on that front.”
Harris also argues that while OpenStax updates materials annually as
needed, it doesn’t do full revisions just for the sake of it. “Our
physics book, which we published in 2012, we haven’t done a revision
yet, and we don’t want to,” he says. “The laws of physics haven’t
changed for the last eight years, I can guarantee you that.”
By virtue of being free, OER materials also heavily skew toward
digital, with hardcover as a secondary option. (Or you can download the
PDF and print it out yourself.) The same caveats about efficacy apply.
But at least OER doesn’t lock you into one digital platform, the way
the major publishers do. OpenStax alone counts around 50 ecosystem
partners to provide homework and testing support. Faculty can choose
the one that best suits their needs, versus being locked into Pearson's
platform when you buy a Pearson textbook.
“You pick what’s best for your course,” says Harris. “We have open
license content that you can adapt, and then you can pick and choose
from five or six online homework platforms that better meet your
curricular needs. That’s getting more flexibility, more innovation, at
a much lower price.”
OER isn’t the right solution for everyone; not every course has a
viable OER textbook option, and even those that do might find a major
publisher’s take on the material superior. That same Babson survey
featured repeated concerns about the quality of both images and text in
OER materials. But if the textbook ownership model is inexorably
changing toward an uncertain end, it’s heartening that at least one
final destination is free.
Like and Subscribe
Or you could always split the difference.
That’s the territory Cengage wants to stake out. Late last summer, the
educational publishing behemoth—it announced a planned merger with
McGraw Hill in May; the combined company would surpass all but Pearson
in market capitalization—rolled out Cengage Unlimited, a “Netflix for
Textbooks” model that rolls all textbook rentals and digital platform
access into a single rate: $120 for a semester, $180 for a full year,
or $240 for two years. Almost a year in, the US-only program has a
million subscribers.
“One of the beauties of the model is the customer, in this case the
faculty, does not need to change anything,” says Hansen. “And it’s
significantly more affordable for the students.”
For students, though, the savings depend on how many of your courses
rely on Cengage textbooks. And since those decisions most commonly
happen at the faculty level, that number can change dramatically from
one semester to the next. In this way it maybe mirrors the Netflix
model a little too closely; what you get out of it can change
precipitously from one month to the next.
As more and more coursework winds up online, the Balkanization of
teaching resources cuts ever deeper. “You’re talking about students
potentially operating on 10 or 15 different platforms as part of their
four-year learning experience in college. That is suboptimal. That’s
clearly suboptimal,” Hansen says. “What we’re trying to do is create
interoperability, where you can actually make the interfaces similar,
and allow the data to travel from one platform to another.”
Cengage acquired a company called Learning Objects in 2015 that could
potentially act a bridge. That process, though, is extremely early
days. And the incentives for it to flourish seem minimal, given the
inherent value of locking teachers and their students into a single
ecosystem across as many courses as possible.
But at least it’s part of the conversation. And while the business of
buying and selling—or leasing, more often—textbooks looks much
different than it did just a few years ago, at least that evolution
tilts toward affordability.
|
|
|
|
