Since going open source with software has potential benefits for South Africa it is time to consider a policy shift towards Open Knowledge for South African education. Many universities are already involved in Open Knowledge Projects but much greater opportunities are opening up for education.
Government has the chance to adopt general policies which encourage this generally. This post considers only one of these possible policies; licensing textbooks under Creative Commons licences.
Insisting on the licensing of all text books bought by South Africa’s public educational institutions under Creative Commons would ensure that textbooks do not go out of print. In addition to other distribution methods the textbooks could be put on-line for anyone to download, print, and use. Educational institutions like schools could also lawfully make as many copies of the books or parts of the books as they need to.
In the short term it will probably be necessary for government to sponsor the creation of these textbooks. This will not mean more expenditure by government on textbooks, since considerable amounts are already spent simply buying books without acquiring copyright in those books. If government were to sponsor the writing of the books, the only remaining costs government would have to pay would be printing and distribution, ever. There would be no repeat copyright costs with each reprint in the future.
Over the medium term collaborative on-line projects can create and continuously update textbooks. It would take only a few hundred teachers, or education students, to create a maths textbook if each one contributed only one exercise each. Editing and evaluation could similarly be distributed as shown by Wikipedia.
Incentives to participate could range from simple love of teaching, through the learning experience gained by participants, to reputation and CV (resume) enhancement.
A textbook would then be the result of the best efforts of a wide range of people rather than a few.
It would also be possible for anyone to translate the textbooks into other official languages, or adapt them for sensory disabled persons without having to pay copyright fees or obtain permission.