‘Living textbooks’ help envision an era of educational abundance

In an essay written in the depths of the Depression in 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes offered a hopeful vision for the role of technology in society. In the past, wrote Keynes, “the struggle for subsistence, always has been hitherto the primary, most pressing problem of the human race.” In 100 years that struggle could come to an end through technological advances. New inventions would increase productivity so much that they would free humanity from the burdens of hunger and meaningless labor.

We are now approaching that 100 year mark.  While working hours declined as productivity increased the promised benefits didn’t extend to most people. The world produces enough food to feed a population four times larger than when Keynes was writing. What he did not foresee is the level of inequality that humanity would be willing to tolerate. He envisioned that economic freedoms would flow down through the social classes, but today the majority of workers still “sweat for their daily bread,” and 733 million people live in hunger.

Stanford bioengineering Prof. Drew Endy (who teaches through Stanford Digital Education’s equitable digital pathways program) argues that we have “the potential for civilization-scale flourishing, a world of abundance not scarcity, supporting a growing global population without destroying the planet.” Yet our politics still reflect a world of scarcity.

We live in an era of learning abundance that mirrors food production. Who could have imagined 94 years ago that the world’s greatest educational institutions would find ways to open their knowledge to learners everywhere, and that Wikipedia would have billions of page views per month?

Yet as with the unequal distribution of food, too many people are starved of educational opportunities.  The educated have grown more educated, and they have hoarded opportunities for themselves. We may have the ability to educate the world, no less than we do to feed it, but we have failed to do so.

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The most important intellectual legacy of Keynes’s essay is the concept of  “technological unemployment,” a term he defined as “unemployment due to our discovery of means of economizing the use of labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor.” This idea has shaped education policy ever since.

Responding to the upheavals of the industrial revolutions, the American response, copied by the rest of the developed world, was to invest in ever-higher levels of public education, successively establishing the world’s first systems for universal elementary education, high school education, and higher education. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin and her co-author and Harvard colleague Lawrence Katz called this the “race between education and technology.” Through the 19th and 20th centuries, education helped workers stay ahead of the threat of obsolescence by continually improving their skills.

The next upheaval, the information revolution of the 1990s, prompted the question: could educators repurpose the very technologies that were transforming the economy into tools that would allow humans to level up, yet again?

Launched in April 2001, MIT Open Courseware (OCW) was a milestone in higher education’s response to that challenge. With funding from the Hewlett and Mellon Foundations, OCW showed that MIT could freely give away syllabi, assignments, and later, lecture videos, at no harm to its own interests. (In fact, the project benefited MIT by reducing silos and allowing students and faculty to better understand the course offerings across the institute.) The creation and mass distribution of global educational public goods offered a mission-driven, not-for-profit alternative to the gold rush of the early internet. MIT was the first university to demonstrate the potential for what economists call a non-rival, non-excludable model of educational publishing. Or, as then-MIT president Charles Vest said, “when you share money, it disappears; but when you share knowledge, it increases.” 

In subsequent years open education lost momentum within higher education and most institutions abandoned it. But the collaborative potential of open creation was realized in Wikipedia, the seventh most visited site on the internet. It depends on the contributions of thousands of editors actively working on editions in more than 300 languages. Wikipedia combines the learning potential of open educational resources with the methodology of open source, the basis of most of our software infrastructure. It showed that high-quality content could be created through radically democratic collaboration. 

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Emerging from a diverse set of Stanford faculty authors, a new model of educational content is applying the lessons of Wikipedia’s success. “Living textbooks” are built on open source principles, using the infrastructure of GitHub (or similar platforms) to facilitate collaboration and dissemination. (GitHub provides the technical infrastructure for 3,800 open source projects, allowing for worldwide collaboration among millions of “committers” to shared code bases and dissemination of shared libraries and projects.) 

With living textbooks, the book becomes an open source project. Contributions can be made to the content or to embedded code. Readers can propose corrections or amendments using the “forking” and “pull request” features that open source committers use to fix bugs or propose new features. And thanks to progressive thinking at university presses such as MIT and Princeton, authors can still publish peer reviewed print versions of their books and benefit from the distribution, prestige, and sales acumen of established publishers. 

Living textbooks need not be open in the same style as Wikipedia. As with open source software, multiple governance structures could work, some more like Apache (projects led by core groups of committers), others more like Linux (with stronger central control). Unlike Wikipedia, living textbooks have named authors who reap the professional rewards of peer reviewed publishing. In the psychology department, Prof. Mike Frank and seven colleagues used this model to publish Experimentology: An Open Science Approach to Experimental Psychology Methods. Similarly Prof. Russell Poldrack published Statistical Thinking for the 21st Century as a living textbook. And in the Doerr School of Sustainability Prof. Ines Azevedo, who coined the living textbook moniker, is co-authoring one based on an energy systems course she co-teaches with Profs. Adam Brandt and Steven Chu. 

David Wiley, one of the pioneers of open education, recently argued that AI represents the demise of open educational resources. Living textbooks offer a rebuttal. While they can be used to train AI, they will not be replaced by it. Human-centered teaching and learning requires trusted resources and references. As long as there is a role for instructors, there will be a need for educational materials. And with living textbooks, any instructor (or student) who uses a textbook can also contribute to its translation, adaptation, and improvement.

Keynes titled his essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.” Despite having the resources for widespread economic freedoms, we failed to provide those possibilities to everyone. In responding to the latest wave of challenges posed by AI we should be attentive to questions of distribution and implementation. We need an open education vision that shares the incipient learning abundance as widely and democratically as possible. The educational possibilities for our grandchildren depend on it. 

With thanks to Zach Chandler.

Matthew Rascoff is vice provost for digital education at Stanford.

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