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Now, with $16 million in venture capital funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and New Enterprise Associates (NEA), the two professors officially launched Coursera, their new online education company that includes partnerships with Princeton University, Stanford University, the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania to offer web-based classes on the Coursera platform for free. A total of 37 undergraduate and graduate-level courses across a broad range of disciplines will launch this spring.

Bookboon makes its digital textbooks available free to college students, has taken the approach of funding its work by including advertising within the pages of the books.

"the best chance to make an immediate and meaningful impact on the price of textbooks is to facilitate the merging of traditional and free content, allowing instructors to include exactly what is necessary, and freeing students from the rigid and expensive traditional offerings from academic publishers. In this model, "book" costs are lowered regardless of output format. If we are cognizant of ways of merging different types of content in order to get the biggest academic bang for the buck, we must also be mindful of methods to access this content; to break it apart, to "disaggregate" it from the traditional bounds of textbooks and to present it to students in an effective manner."

Warning: This is a vendor perspective...

if FWK (or other organizations) can find sustainability while distributing free digital textbooks, the textbook market could be dramatically altered. Because it is so hard to compete with "free," textbook prices would likely come down and eventually become only a small part of the cost of higher education. The potential for the disruption of the textbook publishing industry, as well as the potential savings to students, is enormous if one or more organizations can create a sustainable business model. Whether this can be done remains to be seen.

But now Ms. Finnegan is working to get the book digitally back in circulation, by collaborating with Unglue.it, a Kickstarter-inspired publishing start-up that opened last month. Oral Literature is featured as one of the site's five inaugural campaigns, which ask users to pledge money toward "ungluing" each previously published work. If the campaign is successful, Oral Literature will be available as a free, legal e-book, downloadable from anywhere in the world. Ungluing "is not really buying the rights, and it's not really buying the license," said Eric Hellman, Unglue.it's founder. "It's compensating the rights-holder in exchange for them releasing something with Creative Commons."

The new company, named Rafter, has also introduced a free online database that provides real-time and historical views on economic trends, adoption patterns, and reviews for more than 11 million textbooks. 

"More than 30 professors and 1,200 students are test-driving an alternative to Sakai, called Canvas, this semester, according to Internet Technology project leader Mathieu Plourde. The university has used Sakai for more than four years, but Plourde said he thinks the program shows its age. "

"The startup's been hit with a lawsuit from Pearson, Cengage, and Macmillan, accusing it of copyright infringement. While Boundless Learning says that it's working with OER content and the OER community to create a free learning platform, the publishers contend that the startup "steals the creative expression of others, willfully and blatantly violating the Plaintiffs' intellectual property rights in several of their highest profile, signature textbooks.""

"Princeton, Penn and Michigan will join Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley as partners of Coursera, a company founded earlier this year by the Stanford engineering professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng. Using Coursera's platform, the universities will produce free, online versions of their courses that anyone can take."

Textbooks By Course | New & Used Books, eBooks, Rent Books Help your student body save big on textbooks. Create a completely free textbook exchange to let students trade books to each other.

Dive in with Duke University's Cachalot app, a novel digital textbook designed for students enrolled in Duke's Marine Megafauna class, but free for everyone, everywhere.

"eCub is a cross-platform tool for creating EPUB and MobiPocket books. EPUB is become a popular e-book standard and is open and free for all to implement. EPUB files can be read by MobiPocket, Adobe Digital Editions, FBReader, Stanza, the Sony Reader, and many other readers and applications. MobiPocket books can be read on desktop platforms, mobile platforms and the Amazon Kindle e-book reader."

For millions of students worldwide, free, open courseware provides a window, if not a front-row seat, to top university classes. The formats are as varied as the people who tune in. Some consist mainly of lectures recorded on iTunes, while other courses seek to replicate a classroom experience by offering study groups, computer-graded tests, and weekly assignments. And while you might get a badge or certificate showing you mastered the material, you generally won't get direct interaction with the professor, who may have recorded the lectures a few years ago. Here is a look at five introductory economics classes: four through open courseware and one in a traditional classroom.

Coursera's leaders say they are actively pursuing only two of the moneymaking ideas on the list: charging students who pass the courses a small fee for a certificate, and serving as a matchmaker between students looking for jobs and companies seeking qualified employees.

"Through open education resources promoted by these two bills, materials would be free online or for about twenty dollars in hard copy, as stated in the background of each SB 1052 and SB 1053."

Some states, including California and Washington, are passing bills to mandate the use and creation of open textbooks.

"Welcome to Howard Community College's student training site for Canvas, our new learning management system! Most likely, you will have a course in Canvas in the next few semesters, so we have created this site to explain the main features of the system. Here you will find a module-based training approach, so feel free to peruse each module as needed. In the future, you can use this site as a resource for questions about using Canvas in your courses."

"A free-to-use font designed to help people with dyslexia read online content is gaining favour. OpenDyslexic's characters have been given "heavy-weighted bottoms" to prevent them from flipping and swapping around in the minds of their readers."

The University of California, Irvine OpenCourseWare is now offering four new courses in Public Health, Physics, and Chemistry on iTunes U. iTunes U provides users with free public access to lectures, videos, books, podcasts, and courses from colleges and universities across the globe. Users can download the content to their iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch with the iTunes U app.