Exactly right. This is what we are doing in the legal education space. CALI pays law faculty to write textbooks/casebooks and publishes them under CC-BY license so that faculty AND students can take the materials and do what they want (remix, re-use) for their own learning environment. This is sustainably accomplished by annual dues from law schools and over 95% of them are members of CALI. See http://www.cali.org/the-elangdell-bookstore for our bookstore. Lowering the price for students is a side-effect, but not the primary goal. Better education is our goal.

But once that swap-out is complete, it’s interesting to imagine the flexibility of a school running on OER versus one running on publisher texts. You can start enabling reform of teaching approaches by building off open texts. You can start to build common learning spaces based on those texts.

We’re early in this — it’s mostly cost and small to moderate gains. It will be that for a while. But I think ultimately breaking free of commercial textbooks will have a much larger impact on other parts of teaching than we can currently imagine.

All things being equal, when materials make it easier to do one thing than another, that thing will be done more. Textbooks have enabled the silly way we teach for too long; having control of them allows us to make good pedagogy easier, something textbook companies have only loosely committed to.