GitLab(.com) for higher education open source textbook publishing

Executive summary

  • Make GitLab(.com) the premier platform and service to collaborate, produce, and publish open source content for higher education.
  • Unique market need and timing. Aligns with GitLab's vision.

GitLab vision

GitLab's vision is to allow everyone to collaborate on all digital content. We have an opportunity to move into an industry beyond software development, with little risk.

Market need

  • Traditional higher education is increasingly becoming unaffordable, especially in the United States.
  • Rising tuition costs and other associated costs, including textbooks.
  • Student loans are a huge problem to be solved. The fact that https://studentloanhero.com exists validates this need.
  • Alternatives to traditional education are slowly transforming the field. Higher education will be around for a long time. But the presence of generic learning platforms (such as https://www.coursera.org, https://www.khanacademy.org) and other more industry/skill-based platforms (https://teamtreehouse.com, https://www.codeschool.com) shows that learning is increasingly becoming digitized and commoditized.
  • In particular, https://www.coursera.org is increasingly being adopted by traditional higher education institutions, showing that the near future will see many partnerships and initiatives between old and new.
  • But in the next say, 10 years, we will still have traditional higher education, but with the course material landscape rapidly changing.
  • Course materials are increasingly being commoditized. There are many initiatives to make course materials available for free and open source, to solve the problems of rising costs on the parts of students, e.g. http://openedgroup.org/, https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/.
  • Instructors and students still need textbooks, since it is a convenient unit of education material, that aligns with a "course". Courses are not going away anytime soon, so textbooks are not going away.
  • Instructors are thus moving away from traditional publishers (who are charging the high costs due to the vicious cycle of reduced patronage of textbooks) and opting instead for self-publishing / open source publishing.
  • Content creation is currently laborious and slow: University professors and other academic researchers use old tools (email, desktop word processing) to collaborate and create content.
  • Self-publishing is currently difficult: Typically, LaTeX is used to transform manuscripts into PDFs, which are then uploaded to websites. The process is painful, especially for academic people who do not have technical knowledge of LaTeX and web. Discovery is also difficult. Typically a student or professor might need to Google multiple university websites to find the right textbook.
  • Existing open source textbook examples: http://www.lightandmatter.com/fund/, https://github.com/rbeezer/fcla,
  • https://github.com/showcases/writing shows mostly computer science related materials. The field of computer science learning (or more specifically programming), is already massively digitized with many platforms supporting learning.

Strategic opportunity

  • GitLab has the strategic opportunity to solve many of these problems with it's existing platform and features.
  • With only a few feature enhancements, GitLab can be easily marketed to and used by higher education to collaborate+create content, and publish that content.
  • This would give GitLab a huge opportunity to finally move into a brand new vertical beyond software development, making inroads into the vision of allow everyone to collaborate on all digital content
  • This would be a low-risk initiative. Solving a few problems would make GitLab already suitable (see below). Furthermore, solving these problems would improve GitLab as a product overall. Any investment would not be wasteful since the changes improve the simplicity and usability for GitLab to all users, especially non-technical users, which is already aligned with GitLab's direction.

Problems to solve

  • Issues and merge requests are an excellent way to have structured, discoverable, scalable, and open/transparent collaboration, for many types of digital work, including higher education open source textbooks. The simple paradigm of "issue tracking" has not been adopted broadly outside of software development. But the concept is very natural. The problem to be solved is improving the UI to further reduce complexity for non-technical users. Traditional digital collaboration uses offline documents and email and attachments. Some existing users in the field may use a product like Google docs. We need to take these existing experiences and help translate them to a generic issue tracking model of collaboration.
  • Non-technical users know how to publish content using services like Wikipedia and Squarespace. GitLab needs to solve this problem. The most promising avenue is GitLab Pages, which is already a complete solution for content creation and content publishing. Furthermore, the integration with issues and merge requests is an enormous value add. However, again the complexity of the initial set up is prohibitive to many users. Probably, the complexities of Git and source control would need to be further abstracted away to a user-friendly version-control system.
  • Web publishing is a great solution to the problems of expensive course materials and education. But PDFs are the dominant form of digital consumption for students in higher education. (People still print them too!). This problem would also need to be solved to solve that need.