During the past decade, the massive worldwide conversion of learning content from print and other older media on to digital networks has created gatekeepers who limit access to their digital content or require online users to pay for it.

A variety of gatekeepers have made a third choice:
to open their content freely into the Internet.
These are their stories.

February 10, 2007

Using Moodle by Jason Cole
Creative Commons best selling application book

The print version of the book
For sale at O'Reilly

In a February 2007 interview on The RU Sirus Show Cory Doctorow said he thinks reading long text online is difficult because it is harder to concentrate that when reading something printed. He said he thinks that a potential buyer reads parts of a book online, and if he or she likes it, they will buy it so they can read it more comfortably. As described in an earlier post in this series, Doctorow knows a lot about offering a book for free online and selling copies of it at the same time. He does that routinely with his science fiction novels—novels laced with ideas for an open creative future.

An example of free download and same time sales for a technical text is underway with Jason Cole's Using Moodle, published by O'Reilly in July 2005. O'Reilly describes the subject of the book here:

In recent years, Course Management Systems (CMSs) have matured to the point that they're now considered critical software for many colleges and universities. At a basic level, a CMS gives educators the tools to create a course web site and provide access control so only enrolled students can view it. Beyond access control, a CMS typically offers a wide variety of tools to make a course more effective: an easy way to upload and share materials, hold online discussions and chats, give quizzes and surveys, gather and review assignments, and record grades. In other words, it's a suite of tools that enhance teaching by taking advantage of the Internet without replacing the need for the teacher.

Moodle is the open source CMS used by more than two thousand educational organizations around the world.

The boxes at the right on this page are from O'Reilly's catalog page where it sells Jason Cole's book Using Moodle. The lower box leads to the O'Reilly Safari pages where the book can be downloaded at no cost in PDFs, chapter by chapter. The copyright page explains that Using Moodle is licensed under Creative Commons.

A friend of Stories of Open Resources has passed along word that an O'Reilly editor several weeks ago said to him:

"Using Moodle has been their best selling book on a computer application even though it is also available as a PDF under Creative Commons."