Group items tagged

". Gary Lopez, Executive Director at the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE), and his team think there's a promising middle ground between crowd-sourced Wikipedia-like free instructional resources and traditional publisher-centric product development and distribution. They've just finished developing an interesting example of this new-age product, an Algebra I package offered on a part free, part paid business model that they see as the future of educational publishing"

"OAPEN is pleased to announce a new service for Open Access monographs: the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB). DOAB will provide a searchable index to peer-reviewed monographs and edited volumes published under an Open Access business model, with links to the full texts of the publications at the publisher's website or repository."

" the education startup Highlighter has been tackling, initially offering a JavaScript plug-in enabling "comments in the margins" on blogs and websites. (I chose Highlighter as one of my favorite startups of 2011). Since then, the startup has shifted its focus slightly to become an education publishing platform that lets textbooks be published for the Web (as well as in PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel and ePUB) - all with built-in social marginalia features."

Open source textbook publisher projects $1M in savings OpenStax has been well received on college campuses as textbook prices remain stubbornly high College students in some of the most heavily attended courses in the country will eclipse $1 million in textbook savings after a Rice University-based publisher had 13,000 open-source books downloaded since June.

Pres of Wesleyan on signing Berlin Declaration. "Now that Wesleyan has declared its support for open access to scholarship, what do we do next? One step that has been taken by the faculties of Harvard, MIT, Bucknell, Oberlin College and others is to pass a formal resolution to publish in open access journals, or journals that permit open access to articles via an institutional repository. Because of the complex issues surrounding academic publishing as well as promotion and tenure practices, these resolutions were preceded by thorough on-campus discussions of the issues and how they might be addressed to the satisfaction of faculty members at all stages in their careers. The week of Oct. 24-30 is Open Access Week, a perfect time to begin this conversation at Wesleyan. "

"Rice University this year started an unusual textbook-publishing venture whose books are free to download thanks to a mix of grants and revenue from optional "add ons," such as homework problem sets. Although it has published only two titles-for introductory courses in physics and sociology-officials announced on Tuesday that more than 13,000 students had downloaded them in the 10 weeks they've been available."

Neat idea. A variation on freemium.

"Our free, high-quality digital texts of Shakespeare's plays start with the basics: superb source texts, meticulously edited on the basis of current scholarship. The plays in Folger Digital Texts are taken from the Folger Shakespeare Library editions, completed in 2010 by editors Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine and published by Simon & Schuster. To these texts, we've added sophisticated coding that works behind the scenes to make the plays easy to read, search, and index-and lays the groundwork for new features in the future. We've also used the same page numbers and layouts as in the Folger print editions, so it's simple to use the two together. Our digital texts are also powerful scholarly tools in the fast-growing field of digital Shakespeare research. We encourage researchers and developers to download the coded texts at no cost for noncommercial purposes, including specialized studies and mobile apps."

"Pearson's latest approach to open educational resources (OER) - the free online learning materials that have proliferated over the last decade and a half, posing a threat to traditional publishers. The education and media company today wil unveil Project Blue Sky, a search engine to help instructors locate free materials from popular OER repositories."

Pearson again. These guys are on the march.

"Dear SUNY Faculty, We would like you to consider being one of the first to produce an Open SUNY Textbook. We invite you to apply by submitting a brief proposal by December 17th to publish your textbook as an open educational resource and print-on-demand title, made possible thanks to a SUNY Innovative Instruction Technology Grant and the support of SUNY Libraries & SUNY Press. If selected, you will receive an award of $3,000 upon the completion of all work and required forms. An additional $1,000 will be paid to you if you decide to include and assess student involvement in the design and development of the textbook.* Although an open textbook is free online, you will be eligible to earn royalties on sales of the print-on-demand edition, if applicable."

"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!

"The goal of runestone interactive is to provide the tools, content, and hosting for high quality, interactive computer science textbooks. Everything is available under an open source license. There are really two main branches of the Runestone interactive project: To provide tools for building interactive textbooks. Our ultimate vision is to become 'The LaTeX of interactive publishing.' To this end we have built a platform based on Sphinx, comprised of several extensions for building interactive books. To provide hosting for interactive textbooks. We have three books that we host on this site for free, without registration or login required. We can also host a custom book for your course. If you are an instructor and looking to host your own course here is what you get: You can choose which modules you want to include. Your students get login-based access to their book so they can save their work, turn in homework right from the book, and take notes in the scratch edtitor popups. You get access to the grading interface Runestone interactive is a project of Luther College. "

"Yesterday I had the honor of both attending and speaking at the launch of CUNY City Tech's community publishing platform Open Lab. Built on a WordPress/BuddyPress combo, Open Lab follows in the rich tradition of similar sites at CUNY like Blogs @ Baruch and the Academic Commons. "

"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"

"Millions of learners have enjoyed the free lecture videos and other course materials published online through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's OpenCourseWare project. Now MIT plans to release a fresh batch of open online courses-and, for the first time, to offer certificates to outside students who complete them."

"The Learning Registry addresses the problem of discoverability of education resources. There are countless repositories of fantastic educational content, from user-generated and curated sites to Open Education Resources to private sector publisher sites. Yet, with all this high-quality content available to teachers, it is still nearly impossible to find content to use with a particular lesson plan for a particular grade aligned to particular standards"

"The Learning Registry is a new approach to capturing, sharing, and analyzing learning resource data to broaden the usefulness of digital content to benefit educators and learnerThe Learning Registry: Use, Share, Find, Amplify.s. Not a website or repository… not a search engine… and not a replacement for the excellent sources of online learning content that already exist… ...the Learning Registry is an open source technical system designed to facilitate the exchange of data behind the scenes, and an open community of resource creators, publishers, curators, and consumers who are collaborating to broadly share resources, as well as information about how those resources are used by educators in diverse learning environments across the Web."

"The second thing that Khan has made more accessible is the value of openly licensed educational resources. All material on Khan Academy is licensed under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial license, which ensures that these resources, and any subsequent improvements, will remain freely available. Because of the enormous generosity of Salman Khan, and the resources he has marshalled into this effort, the world now has an enormous body of good quality material that can be used to learn about a broad range of subjects. The body of material within Khan Academy can be used to replace large sections of traditional textbooks. The support of high-visibility donors has given these resources a credibility that other openly licensed materials, for whatever reason, have never enjoyed. Salman Khan's effort and vision in building a large body of openly licensed material has shifted the way people think about open content. Partnerships with SmartHistory, and the plans to include community-created material within Khan Academy, will widen the breadth of content within Khan Academy, while ensuring that this new material remains freely available, freely modifiable, and freely reusable in perpetuity. Potentially, Khan Academy will be accessible enough that people will realize that textbooks provided by the publishing industry are an unnecessary expense we can all live without."

"UNESCO and Commonwealth of Learning are two global organisations that are championing the open learning cause and have just published the results of a major survey: Survey on Governments' Open Educational Resources (OER) Policies. They sent out a questionnaire to all 195 UNESCO member states asking them whether they had any policies concerning the use of OER in the country's schools and universities. Less than half (82) of these countries replied in time but the results show that there are countries who are taking open education seriously and beginning to form national strategies around the open sharing of educational material. "