Alan Levine

"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. "

"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."

"Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation Thursday to create a website on which popular textbooks can be downloaded for free. Twin bills by Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) will give students free digital access to 50 core textbooks for lower-division courses offered by the University of California, California State University and California Community College systems. Hard copies of the texts would cost $20."

Furman videos on writing

"Writer's Web is a free, public-access handbook designed & maintained by University of Richmond students & faculty."

" The main areas of library's involvement are: description and classification, management, preservation, dissemination, and promotion of OER. In order to support these activities, librarians provided expertise in information science areas, especially: metadata standards, vocabularies, indexing and classification, information retrieval, information literacy, and repository technology and management. It was also found, however, that librarians needed to develop expertise in different areas, including SEO and IPR and licensing options, but mainly about e-learning and OER knowledge, technologies and standards."

" 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."

" In this session our team of instructional designers and faculty will share our experiences and what we learned by utilizing an open education course (MOOC) and face-to-face study group sessions for professional development on open education. Incorporating a study group with the online open education course was found to be effective for keeping participants engaged and moving forward through the course topics."

"I'm starting a new research and writing project today that examines the current state of open educational resources. My interest isn't simply identifying where the repositories of OER lie or what they contain. Nor am I just looking at adoption or usage (although yes, the research will address all these things.) See, I'm particularly keen to investigate the formats that these openly licensed materials are in, and by an extension whether they're being remixed."

"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."

"The Saylor Foundation has nearly finished creating a full suite of free, online courses in a dozen popular undergraduate majors. And the foundation is now offering a path to college credit for its offerings by partnering with two nontraditional players in higher education - Excelsior College and StraighterLine."

" Special Issue: Special Issue: OERs and Social Inclusion"

"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."

"This site presents strategies and resources for faculty members and graduate assistants who teach philosophy courses, especially at the introductory level; it also includes material of interest to college faculty generally. The mission of TΦ101 is to provide free, user-friendly resources to the academic community. All of the materials are provided on an open source license. You may also print as many copies as you wish."