Hi, My name is Uri Grodzinski and I am the head of content and analytics at flooved.com. I have just seen this interesting discussion and would like to provide, if I may, some answers and thoughts, as well as to ask some questions of the participants of this group.
Kcrisman – thanks for mentioning us to the group. We’re trying hard not to be ‘yet another company out there’ and appreciate your and your colleagues feedback very very much. Jason, Kcrisman, vdelecroix and everybody – Regarding mailing, yes we have sent some emails, but hopefully you only got one piece of mail from us, and they were not to spammy right? (we are really trying to be careful about that as we hate getting lots of unsolicited mail ourselves). We intend to send only one email to each lecturer, to make lecturers in maths and physics aware of the possibility of using / contributing to out platform. (BTW wish we had a list of lecturers ‘known to have used technology in the classroom’ ). Regarding revenue issues (RJF, William and everybody): 1. We are trying to create a business model that will enable a sustainable open access resource, without relying on continuous grants, and in order that the archiving of this educational content is reliable and that the material will not disappear when a certain lecturer retires. I think we have been very clear about our business model on the website, and we do not have any other secret plans. 2. Access to our OER content is, and will always be, free (it is in fact illegal to put a pay-wall between a user and content that you received for free). We are investing a lot of time (and considerable amount of money) on premium features for which we will of course charge. We are happy of course to hear about alternative ideas for a sustainable business model. ‘curated’ means just what it does in the Oxford dictionary: “select, organize, and look after the items in (a collection or exhibition)” – so there will be no ‘curated version’, which is different from the original version. Authors lose no copyright when submitting to flooved. Ever. And they can update/remove it if they like. So no one is giving away anything to anyone for free that is then sold. If you are interested you can see the exact terms under which professors contrtibute content here: http://www.flooved.com/copyright . Just to be clear the default submission basis is "non-exclusive royalty free worldwide license which can be revoked at your discretion", but we encourage the author to submit on one of the Creative Commons licenses. 3. I suggest you take a look at Prof Reinhard Diestel’s book Graph Theory on flooved: www.flooved.com/reader/3447#1 Prof Diestel has had a low quality PDF of his prominent textbook (part of the Springer graduate series) on his own website for years now, and has been able to show that this in fact increases the sales of his book. He recently chose to upload his book onto our platform, and we are very grateful that he chose to do so, as we are to the rest of the many lecturers who chose to contribute their material. As an author and lecturer, he is keen to enable students and lecturers to respond directly to his book, on the text itself, and interact over it. He also added some annotations that direct the users to the official site of the book, where a hard of soft copy of the book (or specific chapters) can be bought. 4. We ARE NOT planning to sell the names of the students who use our platform, as has been suggested. We are working on other ways of using the data we will collect in a way that will not include the details of the users, unless they choose to opt in to such an option (which they may very well do, as being recruited as a graduate is not the worst thing) 5. Regarding author compensation: we indeed do not currently offer monetary compensation for lecturers for their material, but neither do (or will) we charge anybody for accessing it. Certainly there are many many professors who produce excellent content for their students and are not interested in getting a deal with a publisher. BTW – if you think the current high price of textbooks all goes to pay the authors who invested years of their lives writing them, well… 6. Regarding people whose motivations include their own interests and doing good for others (the ones William mentioned, who of course constitute the core of lecturers who contribute content) – let me just note that not all students out there (and those who would like to learn but are not students) have the money to pay the present-day costs of textbooks. Being mostly a text-based initiative, we cater well to countries where the internet infrastructure will not support video lectures etc., as is common in Africa. Our platform thus gives the lecturer the opportunity to reach out to students worldwide, using material they have already produced, and that would otherwise most likely serve only their own students, and only as long as they teach. A few questions I’d be happy to hear your thought about (I’m also happy to hear your thoughts on other issues of course, but these are things I’m looking for answers on these days): 1. In addition to W|A mention above, we are in in the process of integrating www.writelatex.com , who we think are really useful for easily producing high quality material in Tex. We also integrate MathJax for students to very easily use Latex within their annotations. I wonder what you think about this? Do you think this low threshold will persuade students to start using Latex? Can you share your experience with students using Latex for the first time? 2. How about a mix-and match option? We plan to enable lecturers to mix and match from our Creative Commons content (all with the appropriate attribution of course) so that they can relatively easily produce lecture notes for their students (this is especially good useful when you are trying to build a course from scratch in a hurry, as is often the case). 3. I agree completely that it is a shame that lecturers do not usually get academic credit for educational material they invest a lot of time in, like they do for research. Our view is that our platform can contribute to that by putting this content out there, having it judged by students worldwide, and being recognized for producing especially good lecture notes. This is already much more than what academics get today for producing educational material (except for the thanks of their grateful students). Is there something you think we can do from our side to provide more academic credit for material we get? For example, would you consider putting the reference to such material on your CV? Certainly one would put a full textbook on their CV. 4. In addition, we are considering offering authors who choose to the option of minting a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) for their submitted educational content (at least, the content which if finalized and which they are happy with, which tends to be the content they chose to upload anyway). Do you think that this would be of value to lecturers? On a final note, we’d love to have further discussion and especially we’d like you to tell us what kinds of developments you would be looking for to help you in your teaching and help your students to learn better. Looking forward to hearing from you, Uri Grodzinski (u...@flooved.com) www.flooved.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
