Photo by: David Stewart

A few years ago, one of Professor McCubbrey’s  students, Lenny, was paying his way through the University of Denver himself, working endless hours painting houses to do so. Lenny purchased a book for McCubbrey’s class for $140 and at the end of the quarter sold the book back to the bookstore for a grand total of five dollars.

Lenny made a scene in the bookstore out of frustration and anger and emailed Professor McCubbrey, of the political science department, saying he wished that the Global Text Project discussed in class was up and running, so he wouldn’t have lost so much money.   

That’s when it hit McCubbrey: create an Internet textbook service to save students like Lenny a lot of money.

The Global Text Project is a nonprofit project that provides free, high quality textbooks over the Internet targeted at students in developing economies.  

Don McCubbrey, a clinical professor of business information and analytics in the Daniels College of Business, teamed up with Professor Rick Watson, a colleague who teaches at the University of Georgia, to start the Global Text Project five years ago.

McCubbrey and Watson were aware that many people were upset about the high price of textbooks. They realized that the cost of textbooks was a problem for many reasons including publishers coming out with unnecessary new editions, generating obsolete used books prematurely.

“In the past, independent distributors tried to lower the cost of textbooks by importing international editions and selling them in the U.S., but the major publishers took them to court and won an injunction against the practice,” said McCubbrey. “It is now illegal.”

“We wanted to figure out a way to reduce textbook costs in developing economies where the lack of a quality education can be a hindrance to students trying to lift themselves and their countries out of poverty,” said McCubbrey. “At the same time, however, since Global Text books are distributed over the Internet, they are available anywhere in the world, including the U.S.”

Global Text Project is only one of many initiatives that have emerged in the past few years to deal with the cost of textbooks and other educational content like online videos and computer simulations. The general term for these initiatives is Open Educational Resources (OER).

OER is similar in concept to open source software, which has yielded free software products such as Linux, Open Office and Mozilla Firefox. Some OER products are free, like Global Text, and others cost little and give students several options. For example, the textbook McCubbrey is using in his ITEC 2800 class this quarter is from another initiative which gives students the option of reading the book online for free, buying and downloading individual chapters for $1.99 each, downloading an iPad version of the entire book for $25 or buying the complete book in a paperback version for $35.

The original idea behind the Global Text Project was to have its textbooks written by authors and editors from all over the world. About 30 percent of the books Global Text provides are originals, and the rest are books contributed by other OER authors, that Global Text helps to distribute.

OER is becoming the wave of the future. Its widespread adoption, however, requires that professors be made aware of OER because, ultimately, it is the professor who chooses the educational content for a course.   

“However, many professors do not have time to search for sites to find high quality open content books, so DU and other universities need intermediaries who understand what free or low cost content is available,” said McCubbrey.

Ideally, Professor McCubbrey would love to see a push for cheaper textbooks managed by students like Lenny because they are the ones who receive the direct savings.

“I believe that in less than five years most higher education content will be available online and on tablets like the iPad at low cost ,” said McCubbrey. “I would love to see all DU professors using lower cost options wherever possible.  Students would save money, their backpacks would be much lighter, and the book store will just focus on selling hoodies.”

For more information visit globaltext.org and aiesecus.org.