"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."
"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."
"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. "
"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."
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.
"The Last Langauge Textbook is a campaign to build a completely free collection of language lessons that can serve as a textbook replacement, available on the web, for anyone learning introductory English. We are building this material collaboratively using our existing picture choice, podcast, and multiple choice lesson types, along with a new "story book" one and traditional text wiki pages."
"Orange Grove Text Plus (OGT+) is a joint initiative of the University Press of Florida and The Orange Grove repository. The goal of this partnership is to reduce the cost of books to students by offering no-cost downloadable and printable open access texts that are affordable, accessible, and adaptable to reader preferences. "
"Instruction that was structured linearly, captured in books that were all-inclusive monoliths with a predetermined progression for a uniform, somewhat "creamy" consistency, is shifting to newer forms of instructional content that are more "chunky," beginning as a scattered landscape of digital pieces that are then assembled to support full courses" --> OER supports that shift
"One of the big problems for the Open Education Movement has been the lack of access to scholarly resources, such as the scholarly journals that libraries subscribe to individually or as part of article databases. As anyone who has tried to use Google Scholar or Google Books for research knows, you could end up spending a huge amount of money to buy access to the articles and eBooks that you need. And some things just aren't available online at all."
"This Open Education project has two main strands:
We are developing an e-book which will be a collection of university academics' narratives about their experiences of learning and teaching in their discipline.
We are engaging with institutional policy surrounding OER resources as well afunding OERs."
"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."