Openstax
The twenty-four case studies in Made with CC were chosen from hundreds of nominations received from Kickstarter backers, Creative Commons staff, and the global Creative Commons community.
We did background research and conducted interviews for each case study, based on the same set of basic questions about the endeavor. The idea for each case study is to tell the story about the endeavor and the role sharing plays within it, largely the way in which it was told to us by those we interviewed.
Want to support Made with CC? Sign up for our email list or donate.
OpenStax is a nonprofit that provides free, openly licensed textbooks for high-enrollment introductory college courses and Advanced Placement courses. Founded in 2012 in the U.S.
Revenue model: grant funding, charging for custom services, charging for physical copies (textbook sales)
Interview date: December 16, 2015
Interviewee: David Harris, editor-in-chief
Profile written by Paul Stacey
OpenStax is an extension of a program called Connexions, which was started in 1999 by Dr. Richard Baraniuk, the Victor E. Cameron Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Frustrated by the limitations of traditional textbooks and courses, Dr. Baraniuk wanted to provide authors and learners a way to share and freely adapt educational materials such as courses, books, and reports. Today, Connexions (now called OpenStax CNX) is one of the world’s best libraries of customizable educational materials, all licensed with Creative Commons and available to anyone, anywhere, anytime — for free.
In 2008, while in a senior leadership role at WebAssign and looking at ways to reduce the risk that came with relying on publishers, David Harris began investigating open educational resources (OER) and discovered Connexions. A year and a half later, Connexions received a grant to help grow the use of OER so that it could meet the needs of students who couldn’t afford textbooks. David came on board to spearhead this effort. Connexions became OpenStax CNX; the program to create open textbooks became OpenStax College, now simply called OpenStax.
David brought with him a deep understanding of the best practices of publishing along with where publishers have inefficiencies. In David’s view, peer review and high standards for quality are critically important if you want to scale easily. Books have to have logical scope and sequence, they have to exist as a whole and not in pieces, and they have to be easy to find. The working hypothesis for the launch of OpenStax was to professionally produce a turnkey textbook by investing effort up front, with the expectation that this would lead to rapid growth through easy downstream adoptions by faculty and students.
In 2012, OpenStax College launched as a nonprofit with the aim of producing high-quality, peer-reviewed full-color textbooks that would be available for free for the twenty-five most heavily attended college courses in the nation. Today they are fast approaching that number. There is data that proves the success of their original hypothesis on how many students they could help and how much money they could help save.1 Professionally produced content scales rapidly. All with no sales force!
OpenStax textbooks are all Attribution (CC BY) licensed, and each textbook is available as a PDF, an e-book, or web pages. Those who want a physical copy can buy one for an affordable price. Given the cost of education and student debt in North America, free or very low-cost textbooks are very appealing. OpenStax encourages students to talk to their professor and librarians about these textbooks and to advocate for their use.
Teachers are invited to try out a single chapter from one of the textbooks with students. If that goes well, they’re encouraged to adopt the entire book. They can simply paste a URL into their course syllabus, for free and unlimited access. And with the CC BY license, teachers are free to delete chapters, make changes, and customize any book to fit their needs.
Any teacher can post corrections, suggest examples for difficult concepts, or volunteer as an editor or author. As many teachers also want supplemental material to accompany a textbook, OpenStax also provides slide presentations, test banks, answer keys, and so on.
Institutions can stand out by offering students a lower-cost education through the use of OpenStax textbooks; there’s even a textbook-savings calculator they can use to see how much students would save. OpenStax keeps a running list of institutions that have adopted their textbooks.2
Unlike traditional publishers’ monolithic approach of controlling intellectual property, distribution, and so many other aspects, OpenStax has adopted a model that embraces open licensing and relies on an extensive network of partners.
Up-front funding of a professionally produced all-color turnkey textbook is expensive. For this part of their model, OpenStax relies on philanthropy. They have initially been funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the 20 Million Minds Foundation, the Maxfield Foundation, the Calvin K. Kazanjian Foundation, and Rice University. To develop additional titles and supporting technology is probably still going to require philanthropic investment.
However, ongoing operations will not rely on foundation grants but instead on funds received through an ecosystem of over forty partners, whereby a partner takes core content from OpenStax and adds features that it can create revenue from. For example, WebAssign, an online homework and assessment tool, takes the physics book and adds algorithmically generated physics problems, with problem-specific feedback, detailed solutions, and tutorial support. WebAssign resources are available to students for a fee.
Another example is Odigia, who has turned OpenStax books into interactive learning experiences and created additional tools to measure and promote student engagement. Odigia licenses its learning platform to institutions. Partners like Odigia and WebAssign give a percentage of the revenue they earn back to OpenStax, as mission-support fees. OpenStax has already published revisions of their titles, such as Introduction to Sociology 2e, using these funds.
In David’s view, this approach lets the market operate at peak efficiency. OpenStax’s partners don’t have to worry about developing textbook content, freeing them up from those development costs and letting them focus on what they do best. With OpenStax textbooks available at no cost, they can provide their services at a lower cost — not free, but still saving students money. OpenStax benefits not only by receiving mission-support fees but through free publicity and marketing. OpenStax doesn’t have a sales force; partners are out there showcasing their materials.
OpenStax’s cost of sales to acquire a single student is very, very low and is a fraction of what traditional players in the market face. This year, Tyton Partners is actually evaluating the costs of sales for an OER effort like OpenStax in comparison with incumbents. David looks forward to sharing these findings with the community.
While OpenStax books are available online for free, many students still want a print copy. Through a partnership with a print and courier company, OpenStax offers a complete solution that scales. OpenStax sells tens of thousands of print books. The price of an OpenStax sociology textbook is about twenty-eight dollars, a fraction of what sociology textbooks usually cost. OpenStax keeps the prices low but does aim to earn a small margin on each book sold, which also contributes to ongoing operations.
Campus-based bookstores are part of the OpenStax solution. OpenStax collaborates with NACSCORP (the National Association of College Stores Corporation) to provide print versions of their textbooks in the stores. While the overall cost of the textbook is significantly less than a traditional textbook, bookstores can still make a profit on sales. Sometimes students take the savings they have from the lower-priced book and use it to buy other things in the bookstore. And OpenStax is trying to break the expensive behavior of excessive returns by having a no-returns policy. This is working well, since the sell-through of their print titles is virtually a hundred percent.
David thinks of the OpenStax model as “OER 2.0.” So what is OER 1.0? Historically in the OER field, many OER initiatives have been locally funded by institutions or government ministries. In David’s view, this results in content that has high local value but is infrequently adopted nationally. It’s therefore difficult to show payback over a time scale that is reasonable.
OER 2.0 is about OER intended to be used and adopted on a national level right from the start. This requires a bigger investment up front but pays off through wide geographic adoption. The OER 2.0 process for OpenStax involves two development models. The first is what David calls the acquisition model, where OpenStax purchases the rights from a publisher or author for an already published book and then extensively revises it. The OpenStax physics textbook, for example, was licensed from an author after the publisher released the rights back to the authors. The second model is to develop a book from scratch, a good example being their biology book.
The process is similar for both models. First they look at the scope and sequence of existing textbooks. They ask questions like what does the customer need? Where are students having challenges? Then they identify potential authors and put them through a rigorous evaluation — only one in ten authors make it through. OpenStax selects a team of authors who come together to develop a template for a chapter and collectively write the first draft (or revise it, in the acquisitions model). (OpenStax doesn’t do books with just a single author as David says it risks the project going longer than scheduled.) The draft is peer-reviewed with no less than three reviewers per chapter. A second draft is generated, with artists producing illustrations and visuals to go along with the text. The book is then copyedited to ensure grammatical correctness and a singular voice. Finally, it goes into production and through a final proofread. The whole process is very time-consuming.
All the people involved in this process are paid. OpenStax does not rely on volunteers. Writers, reviewers, illustrators, and editors are all paid an up-front fee — OpenStax does not use a royalty model. A best-selling author might make more money under the traditional publishing model, but that is only maybe 5 percent of all authors. From David’s perspective, 95 percent of all authors do better under the OER 2.0 model, as there is no risk to them and they earn all the money up front.
David thinks of the Attribution license (CC BY) as the “innovation license.” It’s core to the mission of OpenStax, letting people use their textbooks in innovative ways without having to ask for permission. It frees up the whole market and has been central to OpenStax being able to bring on partners. OpenStax sees a lot of customization of their materials. By enabling frictionless remixing, CC BY gives teachers control and academic freedom.
Using CC BY is also a good example of using strategies that traditional publishers can’t. Traditional publishers rely on copyright to prevent others from making copies and heavily invest in digital rights management to ensure their books aren’t shared. By using CC BY, OpenStax avoids having to deal with digital rights management and its costs. OpenStax books can be copied and shared over and over again. CC BY changes the rules of engagement and takes advantage of traditional market inefficiencies.
As of September 16, 2016, OpenStax has achieved some impressive results. From the OpenStax at a Glance fact sheet from their recent press kit:
- Books published: 23
- Students who have used OpenStax: 1.6 million
- Money saved for students: $155 million
- Money saved for students in the 2016/17 academic year: $77 million
- Schools that have used OpenStax: 2,668 (This number reflects all institutions using at least one OpenStax textbook. Out of 2,668 schools, 517 are two-year colleges, 835 four-year colleges and universities, and 344 colleges and universities outside the U.S.)
While OpenStax has to date been focused on the United States, there is overseas adoption especially in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. Large scale adoption in the United States is seen as a necessary precursor to international interest.
OpenStax has primarily focused on introductory-level college courses where there is high enrollment, but they are starting to think about verticals — a broad offering for a specific group or need. David thinks it would be terrific if OpenStax could provide access to free textbooks through the entire curriculum of a nursing degree, for example.
Finally, for OpenStax success is not just about the adoption of their textbooks and student savings. There is a human aspect to the work that is hard to quantify but incredibly important. They get emails from students saying how OpenStax saved them from making difficult choices like buying food or a textbook. OpenStax would also like to assess the impact their books have on learning efficiency, persistence, and completion. By building an open business model based on Creative Commons, OpenStax is making it possible for every student who wants access to education to get it.
Web links
- news.rice.edu/files/2016/01/0119-OPENSTAX-2016Infographic-lg-1tahxiu.jpg
- openstax.org/adopters
