Group items tagged

cnx and others offering free textbooks

Creative Commons licenses provide a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists, and educators. Visual Notes of Honourable John Yap's announcement at #opened12 / Giulia Forsythe / CC BY-NC-SA The government of British Columbia, Canada's westernmost province, has announced its support for the creation of open textbooks for the 40 most popular first- and second-year courses in the province's public post-secondary system.

"The Open Course Library is a project to design and share 81 high enrollment, general education, and pre-college courses. These materials can be used for face-to-face, hybrid and online delivery. Our goals: Lower textbook costs for students Improve course completion rates Provide new resources for faculty"

UMass Amherst: "The Provost's Office and the University Libraries have launched the Open Education Initiative at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Currently underway, this initiative incentivizes the use of textbook alternatives through ten $1,000 grants to faculty."

"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.

Modular, open textbook to teach Critical Thinking; by Peter Bradley of McDaniel

Very nice project. The results are pretty rich: -LMS role is significant. I wonder if that's a general principle. -faculty needed a br... incentive. -the pacing change is interesting.

"Project Kaleidoscope is implementing a set of fully open general education courses across eight colleges serving predominantly at-risk students. The project will dramatically reduce textbook costs and allow collaborative improvement of course design to improve student success."

"eight colleges in California, New York and Nebraska recently founded Project Kaleidoscope, Converge reports. Under this project, faculty from the schools are collaborating on open general education courses, which will only require students to pay about $30 on textbooks per class."

"Open Educational Resources (OER) offer higher education governance leaders a cost-efficient method of improving the quality of teaching and learning while at the same time reducing costs imposed on students related to the purchase of expensive commercial textbooks and learning materials. Leading scholars around the world are already participating in the OER movement even without support from most higher education institutions, including community colleges. Higher education governance officials, particularly boards of trustees and senior academic governance leaders, have a tremendous opportunity to harness the advantages of OER for their institutions. "