Horner transcript full

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ISKME Interview with Free High School Science Texts (FHSST) Founder Mark Horner

In December 2007, the founder of South Africa's Free High School Science Texts (FHSST) project visited ISMKE's offices to talk about the origins of his project, and what is involved with creating open educational resource projects.

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Transcript:

Movie 1

What's an open textbook?

For me an open textbook is just a textbook that's released under a license that allows you to modify and copy it without any constraints. What’s different about open textbooks?

Ideally I think that you'd like free and open textbooks to be at first glance the same as the other textbooks. They shouldn't feel too different from using publishers' textbooks. But we've specifically tried to include a lot of step by step worked examples which we think catered to the needs of the learners, especially weaker learners. But then if teachers want to work on the book or make an exercise sheet using material that's in the textbook or a subset of the notes or a summary, they can take that material, edit it themselves, and distribute it.

So we think that for basic usage, it’s the same as having a textbook from the publisher, the quality and curriculum language should all be the same. But there's greater flexibility for the teacher to adapt and do more dynamic things with the material then when you use a publisher's textbook that's under a closed license.


Movie 2

What inspired you to start a grassroots project (FHSST)?

The project originally started in October 2002. The need for a science textbook at that time was demonstrated to me when I was at a science festival earlier that year and I had been doing simple demonstrations of Chladni plates and interference, and some learners from a rural school that had gone out and clamped together their financial resources Areto buy a notebook and a pen and they'd come to me and asked me if I'd write down everything I'd explained because they didn't have a textbook and they said that their teacher didn't actually, wasn't actually able to explain all of the material to them. And so I said, yeah, not a problem, I'll do that, and I went and sat on my own for a while and I started writing. I just realized that a small isolated piece of material might be useful, but there's just so much information that they need to know, that a comprehensive book, with all of the material, is more relevant.

So, that being in April, it was clear that there was a need. But we didn't get around to really discussing starting this project until October.


What happened next? How did you know this was a bigger need?

So it was clear from the fact that these learners didn't have textbooks that there was a need. We did a little bit of research and discovered that a significant number of people didn't have textbooks. In addition, the entire curriculum was being rewritten at the time. It had already started propagating up from grade one. They call it the new curriculum statement. This next year (2008) will be the year when the new curriculum goes all the way to grade 12.

So all of the textbooks in the schools are being replaced, because the new curriculum and the old curriculum are significantly different.


Movie 3

What’s the opportunity for open textbooks?

And so there are a large number of communities which just don't have the capacity to address the deficiencies. If they're not getting textbooks from the sources they should be getting textbooks from they just have no capacity to solve that problem themselves. The idea then that if it's royalty-free, the cost is significantly reduced. In fact, the books can be produced, if you can print them in bulk, for prices which are at least a factor of 20 less than publishers' alternatives.


Do open texts cost less? What does the bottom line look like?

So the financial bottom line for the project is probably that we can produce a textbook which covers a single grade with a single subject which is proper thread binding, black and white book but with a color film cover for 20 South African Rand, if you can print at least 10,000 copies. You would compare that with the publishers' alternatives which cost at least 200 Rand. So that's a factor of 10 savings, a significant reduction.

: in US dollars today?

With about seven rand to the dollar, so that's about... close to three dollars for a single subject for a single grade.


Movie 4

How did you build credibility for a grassroots open textbook project?

Everybody we spoke to in the beginning thought that we were crazy, trying to write free textbooks, so we didn't get a lot of credibility with teachers or people within faculty, so we stuck to just students. We wrote a significant amount of material on our own, and as we developed more and more material we gained more and more credibility. The more pages we could show people, the more senior people we could impress and convince that the project was actually going to succeed.


How are the textbooks collaboratively created?

All of the material was developed using volunteer contributions, and the project was open to anybody who wanted to contribute, who felt that they could. The idea was just that we would review contributions and modify and give feedback accordingly. We felt that if people had the basic competence in science, they could be trained to write the material appropriately.


Movie 5

What unique student needs did the FHSST textbooks address?

Important considerations were language, in South Africa a lot of people will require that materials be written for a second-language English speaker, and then obviously there's curriculum alignment.

Some of the things we did to ensure the language was appropriate. We automatically calculated some of the reading index scores, like the Gunning Fogg index and Fleisch Kincaid on the website. If you just create your contribution you automatically get told what the reading level is. And for second language you want to aim for two grades below the actual grade of the learner. I don't know how much of an impact that had, but it's actually quite enlightening just what reading level you get back when you write some material. It's quite amazing to see how difficult it is to write for a second-language English-speaker.


Movie 6

How did you find and recruit volunteers to create open textbooks?

Originally recruiting was mostly done face to face. I'd find every graduate student I knew who I thought could contribute, and I'd ask them if they wanted to. And I always asked people to spread the word if they knew somebody else who might be able contribute. We also sent a lot of email to people who might be interested. And then Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, I think I contributed a lot of spam to the world for a long time. You just shamelessly send email to everybody you know just advertising the project and saying that we’re looking for contributions and anybody's welcome to contribute. But I think that most successful recruiting was done face to face. It's easier to turn a personal relationship into a contribution than a virtual relationship.

How did you cope with managing the many volunteers with so few administrators?

We had to automate a lot of things, because we just couldn't cope with it, with 2 or 3 people just trying to manage people who wanted to volunteer. So that's why we moved to a website, which allowed you to sign up automatically and then review a list of assignments, and select an assignment without actually having to have an interaction with the admin team, so to speak, because we just didn't have the time.

Did volunteers work together? What’s a hackathon?

So hackathons are just events where we try to get a whole lot of people together in a room, trying to make it a social aspect because a lot of the work is done online. You don't want people just sitting in their basement, hacking-- they can, but it's nice to put people together in a room and make it more of a social event. At UCT we managed to get hackathons going really regularly. We would just provide pizza and cold drink and people would come and sit for three or four hours and work on specific assignments, specific needs that had been identified by editors for the books that we were working on.


Movie 7

What are the barriers to volunteer productivity? One of the biggest points to remember with volunteers is that your conversion rate- turning a person who says that they want to help, that they're keen to help into a meaningful contribution - is very, very low. So it's essentially very hard to take that good will-- and there's a lot of good will for a project like this, it’s very rare that somebody says that they don't think the project's a good idea-- but turning that good will into a contribution is very difficult. And you really need to cater to volunteer's needs. The technical barrier is one of the worst barriers to overcome. Originally when we first just had our CVS server with LaTeX files on it, firstly many of our users who were windows users or not scientists just had no idea what CVS was. Then once we got rid of CVS then we moved on to the fact that very few people knew how to use Latex. So if these barriers can be overcome, that can play a significant role in improving the ability of the project to include volunteers. Another important thing is that if you have a small admin team, especially if you are doing it in your spare time, you can spend a significant amount of time just catering to the needs of an individual volunteer.


Movie 8

What helps to keep volunteers motivated?

I think to keep volunteers interested you need to simply reduce the technical expertise required if possible, unless you’re looking for volunteers with specific expertise. You need to try to keep it social, keep it focused, but you also need to keep the whole project dynamic. Because as volunteers, they are volunteering their time, and they don't want to write the same sorts of material for hundreds and hundreds of hours on end. There needs to be some evolution, so having goals and small projects which are attainable in relatively short time scales I think helps just with the motivation factor. And you can break a big project down into lots of small goals. It also gives you more focus as a project so I think that can really help with volunteers.

But it is difficult, and every volunteer is in it for-- they have different motivation, and it's difficult to accommodate that. I think you've just got to accept that has their own motivation and you shouldn't assume that the reason you do something is the reason that anybody else is doing the same project.

I think there's a much wider range in motivation than people might realize.

Were there other ways you tried to motivate volunteers?

We ran three different competitions, all looking for different types of material. We thought we could maybe get people to contribute if there was a prize on the line.

The first competition was to write a specific section for a book that was missing. The second competition was to write an essay on some real world application of something that was in the curriculum. The final competition was an editing one.

They weren't very successful, and I think a lot of that has to do with advertising. If you want a competition to be successful you really have to advertise quite widely. We didn't have an advertising budget, we only really had a prize money budget. In the future we should really factor in some real advertising money.


Movie 9

What does it feel like to author and then give up control of the work?

I think it's very difficult for people to give up their work, especially into the public domain, where anybody can do anything with it, and there are issues with people making money off it, so that's always something I try to discuss with people if they want to contribute to the project, because they need to be aware of what it means to produce an open document, and knowing that other people might even be able to make money off of it, that's really quite something. The rationale I usually use is that if the other person takes the material, modifies it, tries to sell it -- well they can sell it of course-- they have to make that material available under the same license. In pure financial terms we could take that source they've developed and sell it at cost and undermine their business model. That pacifies most people who are just worried about the money.

But it is quite something to give something up and have other people modify it. I think there's a lot of room for seeding the production of better material by getting the ball rolling. I wrote a lot of the original stuff in the FHSST textbook and what's there now is much better is much better than what I wrote, and I haven't contributed to the book specifically in a very long time.


Do your contributions to an open, adaptable work live on?

One of the other things I like trying to tell people is that if you write an open educational resource, like a textbook or something like that, it's something which can live on as a contribution to the community, even if you choose to remove yourself from the community and stop contributing. I'm not saying that people going out and doing volunteer work in the community in an educational way is a bad thing, but I think there's the possibility of making a larger impact by writing really good material which persists beyond your contribution directly to the community.


Movie 10

What’s important to know when starting an open educational resource project now?

Presumably a project online so that it's editable by people all from over the world. You must find the technology which is the simplest and easiest to use, and the one which is probably the most open for sharing.

But you should also have a focus. Instead of trying to generate a repository of all of the educational material every country needs on the whole planet, because that's impossible.

If you want to run a project, you need to have some sort of focus. Identify an area where you can make some sort of difference, where there's a need, and focus on getting that done. And then you will be successful; you will produce the material. Find something where you can have well-defined tasks, well defined objectives. Just producing a massive repository of material, how do you even know how far along you are, how close you are to finished? It’s very hard to assess progress. You need some focus. And it's also better for the community, because you produce material where there is a need.


Any other advice for people who are starting OERs?

You need to try to find good volunteers. Finding good people-- a few good people-- is better than finding many weaker people. It usually helps to try to create a social aspect around the whole project, but still with some focus. So just getting together and having pizza doesn't actually generate material. For big volunteer events like that, focused tasks made a big difference, without making the event unfriendly.

You should also spend a significant amount of time trying to identify a partner who you can work with. We made a lot of mistakes. There was technology we could have used which might have been more appropriate, and we just charged on in without doing any sort of survey or review of what was available. We learned a lot of lessons the hard way and there's no point in everybody learning all the lessons the hard way.


Movie 11

Are open textbooks ever complete?

I think a textbook is never complete because the material is always evolving and the way teachers would like to teach it is always changing, especially as new technology becomes available.

So having a textbook, an open textbook which teachers can modify, gives them greater flexibility to cater for those needs, especially if they aren't being catered for by publishers' textbooks.

But we will produce editions of the textbooks as well, fixed versions which can then be printed and distributed and vetted by the department of education. Because the department of education will never vet a dynamic resource. It will only vet a resource which is static, and they can always point to a specific edition of the resource. So we have to cater for both in what we do.

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