Group items tagged

"Wissner-Gross demonstrated their "Hands-On Calculus" book, set to roll out in a couple of weeks. Containing far less text than the average textbook-he estimated it would only be around 50 pages if printed-it primarily uses interactive activities, such as asking students to find a function that is its own derivative by finger-drawing functions and watching the derivatives change in real-time."

Lots of etextbook action from Harvard.

"Eleven Learning publishes open-source, community-powered textbooks and etextbooks. Our books are more relevant, more up-to-date, and less expensive. Our product offerings include a web-based textbook reading interface and a community-commenting platform for textbook authors and educators. Eleven Learning is a privately held corporation. I"

"This project seeks to expand the beta version of a Web-based platform for creating, editing, organizing, consuming, and sharing course materials. We envision building a corpus of open source materials available for dynamic use by the faculty and students at Harvard and beyond. Instead of locking down materials in formalized casebooks, we believe that course books can be "free" (as in free speech) for everyone to access and build upon."

Good to see.

"Our findings might surprise you. We discovered that when we consider all greenhouse-gas emissions over the life cycle of the textbook, from raw-material production to disposal or reuse, the differences between the two types of textbooks are actually quite small. Measured in pounds of carbon-dioxide equivalent (CO2e), a common unit used to measure greenhouse-gas emissions, the use of a traditional textbook resulted in approximately 9.0 pounds of CO2e per student per course, versus 7.8 pounds of CO2e for an e-textbook."

"Mission Statement Writing Commons aspires to be a community for writers, a creative learning space for students in courses that require college-level writing, a creative, interactive space for teachers to share resources and pedagogy. Our immediate mission is to: provide the equivalent of a free writing textbook--the sort of rhetoric and reader that typically costs anywhere from $75 to $100. invite our readers, particularly college faculty, to help us develop this text, so that it meets the needs of students in diverse writing courses. "

We preserve the best of the old - books by leading experts, rigorously reviewed and developed to the highest standards. Then we flip it all on its head. Our books are free online. We offer convenient, low-cost choices for students - softcovers for under $30, audio books and chapters, self-print options, and more. Our books are open for instructors to modify and make their own (for their own course - not for anybody else's). Our books are the hub of a social learning network where students learn from the book and each other.

"The CSU's Affordable Learning Solutions Campaign is designed to enable faculty to choose and provide quality educational content that is more affordable for their students. CSU students typically pay over $800 per year for their books. By reducing their expenses, we believe we can provide better access to a quality CSU learning experience. We are launching this campaign in 2010 and will be continuously improving the services to CSU faculty and students each semester."