Authors Jonathan A. Poritz
License CC-BY-SA-4.0
The Best Things in Life Are Free –
And That Includes Math Books
Jonathan A. Poritz
jonathan.poritz@csupueblo.edu
www.poritz.net/jonathan
Center for Teaching and Learning and
Department of Mathematics and Physics
Colorado State University-Pueblo
6 April 2019, Fort Lewis College
This work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License..
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan The Best Things in Life Are Free... MAA RMS: 6 April 2019 1 / 22
Which “Free” Are We Talking About?
Wiktionary has nine definitions for the adjective free, having in turn 18
sub-definitions1 . In particular, two meanings that English2 conflates are:
• obtainable without any payment; we say “free as in ‘free beer’,” and
• unconstrained, unfettered, unhindered; “free as in ‘free speech’.”
Maybe better examples for the mathematical community are:
• “Morse Theory is free at my office” ... meaning: I am happy to have
unfettered conversations there about this beautiful subject
• “Morse Theory is free at my office,” ... meaning: I have copies of John
Milnor’s book of that title which I distribute, free of charge, at my office.
In this talk, I mean free in both of those meanings.
1
“free”, by Wiktionary contributors, https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=free&oldid=52257548, released under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License
2
but not many other languages!
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan The Best Things in Life Are Free... MAA RMS: 6 April 2019 2 / 22
Or We Could Wimp Out And Use “Open”
The free speech/beer metaphor dates to beginnings of the free software
movement, where it was coined by Richard Stallman.
In an attempt not to scare away business people, Eric Raymond chose
instead to use the phrase open-source software.
A good compromise is FLOSS, for Free/Libre/Open-Source Software.
Whether Stallman or Raymond was right, FLOSS has taken over the world:
think of Android, Linux [maybe the most widely used operating system in
the world], Firefox, MediaWiki [the engine that runs Wikipedia],
Apache [the most widely used web server software in the world], etc.
E.g., when I worked for IBM Research in the early 00s, my youthful radical background in FLOSS was a benefit, not a problem.
The community as a whole has gone with the [wimpy] approach and talks
about Open Educational Resources or OER.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan The Best Things in Life Are Free... MAA RMS: 6 April 2019 3 / 22
What Are Open Educational Resources [OER]?
HB18-1331, Higher Education Open Educational Resources, passed by
the Colorado General Assembly and signed by Governor Hickenlooper on
30 April 2018, defined OER here:
(6) ”OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES” MEANS HIGH-QUALITY TEACHING, LEARNING,
AND RESEARCH RESOURCES THAT RESIDE IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN OR HAVE BEEN RE-
LEASED UNDER AN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LICENSE THAT PERMITS FREE USE OR
REPURPOSING BY OTHERS AND MAY INCLUDE OTHER RESOURCES THAT ARE LEGALLY
AVAILABLE AND AVAILABLE TO STUDENTS FOR FREE OR VERY LOW COST. OPEN
EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES MAY INCLUDE FULL COURSES, COURSE MATERIALS, MOD-
ULES, TEXTBOOKS, FACULTY-CREATED CONTENT, STREAMING VIDEOS, EXAMS, SOFT-
WARE, AND OTHER TOOLS, MATERIALS, OR TECHNIQUES USED TO SUPPORT ACCESS TO
KNOWLEDGE.
3
3
Closed based on the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s definition: “OER are teaching, learning, and research
resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use
and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming
videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.”
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan The Best Things in Life Are Free... MAA RMS: 6 April 2019 4 / 22
First Answer: Free Textbooks
Let’s highlight two words here
(6) ”OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES” MEANS HIGH-QUALITY TEACHING, LEARNING,
AND RESEARCH RESOURCES THAT RESIDE IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN OR HAVE BEEN RE-
LEASED UNDER AN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LICENSE THAT PERMITS FREE USE OR
REPURPOSING BY OTHERS AND MAY INCLUDE OTHER RESOURCES THAT ARE LEGALLY
AVAILABLE AND AVAILABLE TO STUDENTS FOR FREE OR VERY LOW COST. OPEN
EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES MAY INCLUDE FULL COURSES, COURSE MATERIALS, MOD-
ULES, TEXTBOOKS, FACULTY-CREATED CONTENT, STREAMING VIDEOS, EXAMS, SOFT-
WARE, AND OTHER TOOLS, MATERIALS, OR TECHNIQUES USED TO SUPPORT ACCESS TO
KNOWLEDGE.
So OER include free textbooks [in the sense of free beer ].
Students tend to like this a lot, and it changes their behavior in many ways.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan The Best Things in Life Are Free... MAA RMS: 6 April 2019 5 / 22
Second Answer: “Repurposing by Others”
But notice this also includes
(6) ”OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES” MEANS HIGH-QUALITY TEACHING, LEARNING,
AND RESEARCH RESOURCES THAT RESIDE IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN OR HAVE BEEN RE-
LEASED UNDER AN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LICENSE THAT PERMITS FREE USE OR RE-
PURPOSING BY OTHERS AND MAY INCLUDE OTHER RESOURCES THAT ARE LEGALLY
AVAILABLE AND AVAILABLE TO STUDENTS FOR FREE OR VERY LOW COST. OPEN
EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES MAY INCLUDE FULL COURSES, COURSE MATERIALS, MOD-
ULES, TEXTBOOKS, FACULTY-CREATED CONTENT, STREAMING VIDEOS, EXAMS, SOFT-
WARE, AND OTHER TOOLS, MATERIALS, OR TECHNIQUES USED TO SUPPORT ACCESS TO
KNOWLEDGE.
So OER also include resources which can be adapted, mixed with other
OER, and then shared back to the global scholarly community.
Faculty tend to like this, and it changes their behaviors in interesting ways.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan The Best Things in Life Are Free... MAA RMS: 6 April 2019 6 / 22
[Micro]Economic Issues for Students
The #RealCollege Survey found4 in 2017 that for university students
• 36% were food insecure in the 30 days before taking the survey,
• 36% were housing insecure in the last year, and
• 9% were homeless at some point in that year.
[Figures increase by about one third for community colleges.
Students face these economic burdens at the same time that tuition is
going up faster than inflation [as the cost of “public” higher ed is more
and more born by the individual students].
Then a class a student needs or wants requires an expensive textbook –
$100, $200, $300, or even $400 is not unknown today.
Now ask yourself: if you were a student in debt, [sometimes or often]
hungry, and concerned about keeping a roof over your head ... where
would your economic priorities be?
4
Still Hungry and Homeless in College, Goldrick-Rab, Richardson, Schneider, Hernandez, and Cady, 2018, on the web here.
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[Macro]Economic Issues for Students
These individual decisions students make are happening in the context of
other financial burdens increasing steeply on students. The result is well
known:
total student debt in the U.S. exceeds $1.5 trillion.
Some examples in Colorado:
Institution Avg Debt, 2014 Grads
CSU-Pueblo $29,914
MSU, Denver $28,468
Colorado College $19,756
University of Denver $29,050
All private[non-profit]
$25,064
and public 4-years in CO
2014 is most recent complete data available
Average debt of 2017 CSU-FC grads was $26,348
Source: https://ticas.org/posd/state-state-data-2015#
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Students Pay Many Different Costs...
Consumer price indices for tuition and school-related items,
not seasonally adjusted, January 2006-July 2016
January 2006 = 100
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2016/college-tuition-and-fees-increase-63-percent-since-january-2006.htm
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan The Best Things in Life Are Free... MAA RMS: 6 April 2019 9 / 22
...But the Winner5 Is: Textbook Cost
Increase in textbook costs since 1980
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
5
in terms of rate of growth, not absolute size
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan The Best Things in Life Are Free... MAA RMS: 6 April 2019 10 / 22
Your Intuition for Textbook Costs is Wrong
One attempt to correct our intuition for these different rates of inflation:
Source: https://mathematikoi.net/
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan The Best Things in Life Are Free... MAA RMS: 6 April 2019 11 / 22
But Why Do Textbooks Cost So Much?
A broken market mechanism: faculty choose, students pay. Publishers
understand this.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan The Best Things in Life Are Free... MAA RMS: 6 April 2019 12 / 22
Consequences for Students
Studies6 have shown that, as a result of these economic realities, students
• make decisions about which courses to take based on the costs of the
textbooks;
• take fewer courses because of expensive textbooks;
• do not buy even required textbooks, because of cost, and therefore
learn less, do more poorly, and drop out more frequently; and
• take longer to complete degrees because of the obstacle of textbook
cost.
A particularly exciting recent study7 found that DFW rates went down
by one-third among minority and Pell-eligible students in gateway
courses which switched from commercial textbooks to OER.
6
See references in Report to the Joint Budget Committee and The Education Committees of the General Assembly – Open
Educational Resources in Colorado, Brown-Sica et al., 2017, on the web here.
7
The Impact of Open Educational Resources on Various Student Success Metrics, Colvard, Watson, and Park,
International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (2018), on the web here.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan The Best Things in Life Are Free... MAA RMS: 6 April 2019 13 / 22
Scholarly Production Wants to Be Free
Faculty are not used to thinking of the economic consequences of their
choices, nor of their work as being in a marketplace8 .
We are used to signing over our copyrights on research papers to the
journal publishers, who in turn make large profits on subscriptions which
they in no way pass on to the article authors.
Scholars do tend to keep the copyrights on their monographs and
textbooks, although usually tied up in restrictive contracts.
It is as rare as winning the lottery (or getting struck by lightning) that a
book will sell enough to make some serious money for the author.
Scholars mostly seek impact, which comes when others use a work in new
ways – clearly without first asking permission. We hope someone else will
take our ideas, with attribution!, and do something amazing.
In this sense, scholarly production wants to be free, as in speech.
8
other than “the marketplace of ideas”
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan The Best Things in Life Are Free... MAA RMS: 6 April 2019 14 / 22
Freedom Includes the Right to Seek a Profit, or Not
If a professor wants to assign an expensive textbook in a class (and has a
good reason to do so) or wants to publish a textbook commercially with
the hope of writing the runaway bestseller on economic history, then by
academic freedom and scholarly tradition, we should not stand in the way.
But usually, many faculty will be happy to contribute their textbooks,
problem banks, software, and other writings to a global intellectual
commons, a Creative Commons.
If there were a way to dedicate a creative work to this commons, rather
than having it automatically fall into the domain of all rights reserved
copyrights – as any work of original expression does as soon as it is fixed in
a tangible medium9 – many scholars would likely do so.
9
this is the trigger which causes a copyright to spring into existence: no registration or formalities is actually required.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan The Best Things in Life Are Free... MAA RMS: 6 April 2019 15 / 22
Creative Commons Licenses
The way to bend copyright law to the purposes of the scholarly life is to
release works with a Creative Commons Licenses:10
Educational resources release with a CC license – well, not those two
licenses with “ND” – are open to repurposing by others, in the words
of HB18-1331, and therefore are Open Educational Resources [OER].
OER can be customized, localized, adapted to a faculty member’s own
way of teaching, unlike [commercial] textbooks under traditional copyright.
Only OER truly respect an instructor’s academic freedom!
10
see https://creativecommons.org
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan The Best Things in Life Are Free... MAA RMS: 6 April 2019 16 / 22
Where Are OER?
This is not just a beautiful dream: scholars around the world are constantly
producing a huge variety of OER, which can be found in many places:
• web pages
→ for some individual’s personal work, e.g.,
http://www.poritz.net/jonathan/share/
→ for a particular OER e.g., http://www.introtoie.com/
• repositories, including those run by
⇒ universities, e.g., https://www.csupueblo.edu/library/
services/faculty-support/scholarship.html
⇒ disciplinary organizations, e.g.,
https://aimath.org/textbooks/
⇒ several NGOs, e.g., https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/,
https://openstax.org/, https://rebus.community/, etc.
⇒ OER-promoting state offices, e.g.,
https://www.floridashines.org/orange-grove
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan The Best Things in Life Are Free... MAA RMS: 6 April 2019 17 / 22
An Issue for Math OER: Difficult Typesetting
LATEXwas FLOSS even before Stallman dreamt of free-speechifying beers!
Today, we mostly share LATEX output in PDF form. But PDF is where
OER go to die, it is said (because PDFs are so hard to modify). So it is
important to share also your LATEX source files. There are several ways to
do this. One is Overleaf – e.g., Kenneth Monk’s Calculus I book. Another
is just to build a web page with all the files – e.g., the page for my number
theory book.
Many OER are produced today in Pressbooks, a WordPress extension
that many people like. Like other websites, this can use the MathJax
Javascript library to make beautiful output easily (if you know LATEX).
There is also a tool called PreTeXt (see https://pretextbook.org/) which
is probably better (ask me why, later) – see, e.g., More Discrete Mathematics:
via Graph Theory by UNC’s Richard Grassl and Oscar Levin.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan The Best Things in Life Are Free... MAA RMS: 6 April 2019 18 / 22
Another Issue for Math OER: Interactivity and Ancillaries
Nowadays, there is a trend towards ebooks having interactive features (about
. There are nice tools which can be used
which I have mixed feelings .. but it is definitely a trend)
in web-based OER that do this, including things like Desmos and H5P.
Probably more important because of the current model for delivery of
math instruction, is online homework systems. Here the MAA has come to
the rescue: it supports a wonderful tool called WeBWorK (see
webwork.maa.org) which is a bit intimidating but amazingly effective in
practice. Brenda Forland of our region (based at Red Rocks Community
College) has done some amazing things with it, which she recounted in a
wonderful webinar which the CO OER Council11 sponsored (and
recorded!).
11
an entity created by the CO HB18-1331 quoted above that works with the Colorado Department of Higher Education to
support OER efforts in our state with, e.g., a conference and (small) grant program
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan The Best Things in Life Are Free... MAA RMS: 6 April 2019 19 / 22
What You Can Do Now, part 1
Students: advocate for OER! ... but carefully! Talk to me individually about how.
Faculty: first of all, please promise me you will use OER unless absolutely
no acceptable one exists, or can be created [or adapted from existing
ones]! Remember
• $1.5trillion in student debt
• 10% homelessness
• increased academic freedom
• textbook costs increase at three times the rate of ambient inflation
• OER adoption yields 13 decrease in DFW rate for students from
traditionally underrepresented groups
How often in your professional life have you had the chance to make make
the world a noticeably better place, in a way which existing structures
(academic freedom) empower you to do even if others want to stop you?
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan The Best Things in Life Are Free... MAA RMS: 6 April 2019 20 / 22
What You Can Do Now, part 2
More for faculty:
• start and OER committee on your campus
• talk to your librarian colleagues (they have super-powers)
• watch Brenda Forland’s webinar on WeBWorK:
https://youtu.be/oMY60vqIQ0Y
• go to OER conferences (∃many such)
• apply for OER grants (∃many such)
For the last two of the above, Coloradans should look at this site:
https://masterplan.highered.colorado.gov/oer-in-colorado/
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan The Best Things in Life Are Free... MAA RMS: 6 April 2019 21 / 22
Questions, Comments, and Contact Info
Questions? Comments?
Also feel free to contact me at jonathan@poritz.net .
Get these slides at http://poritz.net/j/share/OER4RMSapril2019.pdf and
all files for remixing12 at http://poritz.net/j/share/OER4RMSapril2019/ .
If you don’t want to write down that full URL, just remember
poritz.net/j/share or
poritz.net/jonathan/share or even just
poritz.net/jonathan .
12
subject to CC-BY-SA
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