Authors Jonathan A. Poritz
License CC-BY-SA-4.0
Spring 2020 ColoMATYC Conference
Open Educational Resources for Mathematics:
the First 2,500 Years
Jonathan A. Poritz
jonathan@poritz.net
www.poritz.net/jonathan
Department of Mathematics and Physics and
Center for Teaching and Learning
Colorado State University Pueblo
Front Range Community College, 13 March 2020
This work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license.
These slides can be found at https://poritz.net/j/share/OER4ColoMATYC
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan OER @ Spring 2020 ColoMATYC FRCC, 13 March 2020 1 / 29
Some Roots of Open: A Morality Play...
The School of Athens by Raffaello Sanzio
Image in the public domain: Raffaello died in 1520. Original in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican. This version:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%22The School of Athens%22 by Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino.jpg.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan OER @ Spring 2020 ColoMATYC FRCC, 13 March 2020 2 / 29
Pythagoras1 : Keeping Knowledge Secret on Pain of Death
He didn’t prove or originate “his” theorem.
The Pythagoreans were quite like a cult, with odd
dietary restrictions, belief in their leader’s magical
powers (talking to animals, etc.), divided as:
• mathematikoi [“learners”] who√lived apart and
knew hidden mysteries (e.g., that 2 is irrational);
• akousmatikoi [“listeners”] who lived with their
families and only aspired to greater secrets.
Hippasus of Metapontum, a renegade mathematikos, was tracked
√ down
and executed for the crime of revealing to the public that 2 is irrational.
[Pythagoras himself was killed when unwilling to step into a bean field
despite being pursued by an angry mob.]
1
born ≈570BCE, Samos, died ≈495BCE, Croton
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan OER @ Spring 2020 ColoMATYC FRCC, 13 March 2020 3 / 29
Euclid3 ’s Radical Openness
His Elements of Geometry had more editions and
influence than any other book [in the West; other
than the Christian Bible].
The Elements was loved by Galileo, Newton,
Hobbes, Spinoza, Descartes, Abraham Lincoln, Al-
bert Einstein ... and many, many others2
For hundreds of years [in the west] it was a right
of passage in the education of [yes, male and elite] young
people to master The Elements.
The Elements was so influential because it was completely open, laying
out all of its Theorems with proofs [including one that √2 ∈/ Q].
Proofs are like like the source code if a theorem were a program: Yes, Euclid was doing FLOSS [free/libre/open-source software]
more than 2K years before the invention of the computer!
2
E.g., In Moby Dick, Melville says that the difficulty of whales mentally putting together the
two images perceived by their widely separated eyes must be as if a human were ”simultaneously
to go through the demonstrations of two distinct problems in Euclid.”
3
mid-4th C to mid-3th C (BCE), Ptolemaic Alexandria
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan OER @ Spring 2020 ColoMATYC FRCC, 13 March 2020 4 / 29
Open’s Antiquity ... and Skipping to Early Modernism
Conclusion: while Closed has had very good PR, Open has a proven track
record of scholarly and educational success and influence.
Additionally, Open as a scholarly practice did not start with the founding
of reddit, or with Linus Torvalds or Richard Stallman or Larry Lessig.
Instead it has a long a beautiful history.
To see the roots of the momentum swinging back against Open [in the West],
let’s skip past a few uneventful years (rise and fall of the Roman Empire,
the Black Death, the Renaissance – wait: Hi, Raffaello! – the Protestant
Reformation, etc., etc.), until the beginnings of classical Liberalism and
Capitalism as the ancien régime started to crumble....
The idea [of people like Adam Smith] was to motivate people to do the
“right things” in society by market forces: the whole dynamic of
Capitalism with its producers always pressured to make better goods
because consumers vote with their feet for the best products, by walking
over to the purveyors of those better versions.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan OER @ Spring 2020 ColoMATYC FRCC, 13 March 2020 5 / 29
The Copyright Clause
Article I, Section 8, Clause 8. the Copyright Clause, of the US
Constitution, gives Congress the power
“To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing
for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to
their respective Writings and Discoveries.”
This exclusive Right includes: performance, public display, copying,
distribution, and creation of derivative works.
See my Copyright Cheat Sheet For University Faculty for one academic’s4 explanation of many aspects of copyright law.
The limited Times have been changed – extended! – again and again by
Congress. Currently in the US, copyrights last for the life of the author
plus 70 years ... but there are many details to consider, including
exceptions such as fair use.
4
Not a lawyer!
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan OER @ Spring 2020 ColoMATYC FRCC, 13 March 2020 6 / 29
Yes, Milton, Markets Can Fail 1
A bookshelf in my office at the
math department at CSU Pueblo,
containing mostly books5 I used as
an advanced undergrad and grad
student.
5
And some juggling equipment.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan OER @ Spring 2020 ColoMATYC FRCC, 13 March 2020 7 / 29
Yes, Milton, Markets Can Fail 2
Books sent to me, for free, without my asking, by textbook publishers
[thrown under a side table]:
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan OER @ Spring 2020 ColoMATYC FRCC, 13 March 2020 8 / 29
Yes, Milton, Markets Can Fail 3
Result of a short visit to Amazon.com (which is usually significantly
cheaper than our campus bookstore) to price just a few of those books:
$2,416.31
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan OER @ Spring 2020 ColoMATYC FRCC, 13 March 2020 9 / 29
Yes, Milton, Markets Can Fail 4
Rather than the usual capitalist feedback between buyer and seller, for
textbooks the buyer [a student] is different from the decider [the
professor]. Indeed, the decider [professor] is given not only free units, but
also is bribed by the seller with many other goodies [test banks, homework
solution books, PowerPoint decks for classroom use, etc.]. And so...
Increase in textbook costs since 1980
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan OER @ Spring 2020 ColoMATYC FRCC, 13 March 2020 10 / 29
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 OER @ Spring 2020 ColoMATYC FRCC, 13 March 2020 11 / 29
Student Debt for Some Colorado Institutions
The easiest single indicator of exploding prices for students is:
total student debt in the U.S. is around $1.64 trillion.6
Some examples in Colorado:
Institution Median Debt, 2015 Grads
CSU Pueblo $29,914
Front Range Community College $13,500
Colorado College $19,756
University of Denver $29,050
All private[non-profit]
$25,064
and public 4-years in CO
Aggregate Colorado Community
$11,730
College System
Sources: https://ticas.org/posd/state-state-data-2015# and https://www.communitycollegereview.com/
6
Source: https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g19/current/default.htm
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan OER @ Spring 2020 ColoMATYC FRCC, 13 March 2020 12 / 29
Side remark: It’s not just a market failure
Funding Sources For Higher Education In Colorado7
So, there is no real public higher education in Colorado.
Nor in a majority of the other states in the U.S.
7
State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, https://www.sheeo.org
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan OER @ Spring 2020 ColoMATYC FRCC, 13 March 2020 13 / 29
Food and Housing Insecurity Among Students in the US
The #RealCollege Survey found8 in 2019 that for students in higher
education in the United States
• 39% were food insecure in the 30 days before taking the survey,
• 46% were housing insecure in the last year, and
• 17% were homeless at some point in that year.
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?
This is all very depressing... but maybe mass production has reduced
costs, so shouldn’t textbooks be nearly free?
8
#ReallCollege 2020: Five Years of Evidence on campus Basic Needs Insecurity, Baker-Smith, Coca, Goldrick-Rab, Looker,
Richardson, Wilson, 2020, on the web here.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan OER @ Spring 2020 ColoMATYC FRCC, 13 March 2020 14 / 29
Textbook Costs 1
We saw this graph before:
Increase in textbook costs since 1980
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan OER @ Spring 2020 ColoMATYC FRCC, 13 March 2020 15 / 29
Textbook Costs 2
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 OER @ Spring 2020 ColoMATYC FRCC, 13 March 2020 16 / 29
Consequences for Students
Studies9 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 study10 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.
9
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.
10
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 OER @ Spring 2020 ColoMATYC FRCC, 13 March 2020 17 / 29
Conclusion of These Economic Issues
In summary:
• Grim, soulless neoliberalism has turned higher education from a public
to a private good, resulting in a sky-rocketing cost to students.
• Students are in debt, and many are hungry and not confident in their
housing situation.
• Textbooks costs are rising much faster than essentially all other
consumer goods, because of a broken feedback loop in this market.
• As a result, students are learning less, doing less well, dropping out
more, and taking longer to finish degrees.
• Switching to OER has large, immediate gains for student success,
particular among underrepresented groups.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan OER @ Spring 2020 ColoMATYC FRCC, 13 March 2020 18 / 29
Wait, what was that term “OER?”
The acronym “OER” stands for Open Educational Resources.
In context above, it seems mostly to mean “free textbooks,” but for that
same low price you get even more:
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.
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
Only OER truly respect an instructor’s academic freedom!
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan OER @ Spring 2020 ColoMATYC FRCC, 13 March 2020 19 / 29
What is academic freedom, and [why] do we deserve it?
Institutions of higher education are conducted for the common
good and not to further the interest of either the individual
teacher or the institution as a whole. The common good de-
pends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition.
Academic freedom is essential to these purposes and ap-
plies to both teaching and research. Freedom in research is
fundamental to the advancement of truth. Academic freedom
in its teaching aspect is fundamental for the protection of the
rights of the teacher in teaching and of the student to freedom
in learning.
emphasis added
American Association of University Professors
1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan OER @ Spring 2020 ColoMATYC FRCC, 13 March 2020 20 / 29
That word “common” – how wide a net do we cast?
The UN has a very expansive view of what the
common good is, including11 the idea that
“...higher education shall be equally accessible to all...”
The US recognizes12 physical and mental disabilities to
be handicaps; at CSUP we must say in our syllabi that
‘...no student shall be denied the benefits of an
education ’solely by reason of a handicap’...”
Note that the ADA doesn’t say “17% of students may be denied the
benefits of an education” or even 10% or 1% – it is “no student”!
Question: Do you think a student is more responsible for their financial
situation than for “handicaps?” What percentage of students are you
willing to deny the benefits of education based on financial difficulties?
11
in Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
12
in the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan OER @ Spring 2020 ColoMATYC FRCC, 13 March 2020 21 / 29
Freedom includes the right to be an ass, or a saint
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 in the
hope of writing the next bestseller on the history of refrigeration, 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
copyrights13 , many scholars [and, more widely, artists] would likely do so.
The way to do this is with Creative Commons Licenses.
13
Which I like to think of as the Land of Mordor, where the Shadows lie.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan OER @ Spring 2020 ColoMATYC FRCC, 13 March 2020 22 / 29
Creative commons licenses
The way to bend copyright law to the purposes of the scholarly [and
artistic] life is to release works with a Creative Commons Licenses:14
Educational resources released with a CC license – well, not those two
licenses with “ND” – are open to repurposing by others, allowing faculty
to build bespoke resources that fit perfectly their class, and their ideas for
how to teach it. Which ideas we must respect because academic
freedom.
Take the Creative Commons Certificate Course – I did, it’s incredibly useful and fun! So much fun, in fact, that now I teach it!
14
see https://creativecommons.org or my Creative Commons Cheat Sheet for University Faculty
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan OER @ Spring 2020 ColoMATYC FRCC, 13 March 2020 23 / 29
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 OER @ Spring 2020 ColoMATYC FRCC, 13 March 2020 24 / 29
An Issue for Math OER: Difficult Typesetting
LATEXwas FLOSS even before the Internet was a twinkle in Al Gore’s eye.
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 or the page for this slide deck.
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 – see, e.g., More Discrete Mathematics: via Graph
Theory by UNC’s Richard Grassl and Oscar Levin.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan OER @ Spring 2020 ColoMATYC FRCC, 13 March 2020 25 / 29
Another Issue for Math OER: Interactivity and Ancillaries
Nowadays, there is a trend towards ebooks having interactive features (about
which I have mixed feelings .. but it is definitely a trend). There are nice tools which can be used
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 and colleagues at Red Rocks Community College
have done some amazing things with it – talk to her (or watch a wonderful
webinar which the CO OER Council15 sponsored (and recorded, here).
15
an entity created by Colorado’s HB18-1331 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 OER @ Spring 2020 ColoMATYC FRCC, 13 March 2020 26 / 29
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
• $1.64trillion in student debt
• 17% homelessness
• increased academic freedom
• textbook costs increase at three times the rate of ambient inflation
• OER adoption yields 31 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 OER @ Spring 2020 ColoMATYC FRCC, 13 March 2020 27 / 29
What You Can Do Now, part 2
More for faculty:
• start an OER committee on your campus
• use an OER textbook in a class – start with one from OpenStax or
The Open Textbook Library, that’s probably easiest
• talk to your librarian colleagues (they have super-powers)
• go to OER conferences (∃ many such, such as the Colorado OER
Conference and the Open Ed 2020 conference, which will probably be
in Colorado), pandemics permitting.
• apply for OER grants (∃ many such, such as from the state of
Colorado and the U.S. Department of Education)
• Coloradans should keep and eye on this site for other announcements
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan OER @ Spring 2020 ColoMATYC FRCC, 13 March 2020 28 / 29
Questions, comments? Contact. Getting slides [links!]
Questions? Comments?
Email (feel free!): jonathan@poritz.net ; Tweety-bird: @poritzj .
Get these slides at poritz.net/j/share/OER4ColoMATYC.pdf and all files
for remixing16 at poritz.net/j/share/OER4ColoMATYC/ .
If you don’t want to write down that full URL, just remember
poritz.net/jonathan/share
or poritz.net/j/share
or poritz.net/jonathan [then click Always SHARE]
or poritz.net/j [then click Always SHARE]
or scan −−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−→
[then click Always SHARE]
16
subject to CC-BY-SA
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan OER @ Spring 2020 ColoMATYC FRCC, 13 March 2020 29 / 29