Group items tagged

"Open-source textbooks, free for students to use and for professors to modify, are being developed by more companies and adopted in more classrooms. They may work hand-in-hand with the rise in free online courses to revolutionize the way we view-and pay for-higher education."

"In the spring semester of 2011, the Provost's Office and the University Libraries launched the Open Education Initiative at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. This initiative incentivizes the use of textbook alternatives through ten $1,000 grants to faculty. Using any combination of Open Educational Resources and proprietary Library resources, this initiative aims to bring about new ways of conceptualizing higher education tools, hopefully saving undergradute students hundreds of dollars each year. Below is a copy of the Open Education Initiative announcement and guidelines."

"We are are very pleased to announce that all Flat World Knowledge textbooks published under an open license are permanently and freely available from Saylor.org - free to read, free to download, free to share and remix under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license."

Nice!

" California would seek to provide college students with free textbooks online under two bills approved by the state Senate."

"It's been 11 days since the launch of the Open Course Library and we had our 10,000th visitor today. The launch of these 42 courses was covered at least 67 times by reporters and bloggers, which will hopefully lead to increased faculty adoptions. The Student PIRGs has also written a cost analysis of the Open Course Library which shows that the textbook savings being realized this year alone is already more than the cost of the project itself. As of the first week the course materials we created have been adopted by faculty in New York, Oregon, Washington, and Romania. "

"Lumen Learning, a new company that will offer guidance and support to institutions looking to use those resources. One of the company's goals is to collaborate with colleges to develop an associate degree in business administration that can be completed entirely with free open-education materials."

"Faced with the challenge of keeping up with the rapidly changing field of information systems (IS), author and teacher John Gallaugher opted to write an open source textbook with a new online company, Flat World Knowledge (FWK)."

"Open educational resources, electronic textbooks, and social media for teaching and learning at the University of Delaware and beyond."

" This is an archive of examples for Critical Thinking instruction that is developed and maintained by instructors of Critical Thinking. The standard 'star rating' and 'comment' features of wordpress will allow us to track student interest in a precise way. The classification system will allow instructors to tailor examples to disciplinary interest, rather than just general ideas. See Textbooks 2.0 for a discussion of the power of the medium itself."

"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. "