Open textbooks in public education. Experience from Poland and Romania.
The purpose of this policy brief is to provide an overview of changes to the models for provision of textbooks in public education in Poland and Romania. In both states, changing textbook provision models created an opportunity for introducting an open licensing rule for public textbooks.
In Poland, changes introduced in 2014 led to a model, in which publicly created open e-textbooks compliment and to some extent compete with commercial offerings. This also translated to significant savings for parents of schoolchildren, and taxpayers in general. The government continues to fund the creation of additional OERs and new measures are taken to reduce barriers to OER adoption.
In Romania, a reform conducted in 2017-2018 is causing a shift from market to public provision of textbooks. Copyright-related issues remain a crucial factor and the government decided to acquire intellectual property rights to the textbooks. This creates an opportunity to openly license publicly funded textbooks.
This policy brief was written by Alek Tarkowski (Centrum Cyfrowe, Poland) and Ovidiu Voicu (Center for Public Innovation, Romania) for the 2018 Open Education Policy Forum.