Group items tagged

"Funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, College Open Textbooks is a collection of colleges, governmental agencies, education non-profits, and other education-related organizations that are focused on the mission of driving the awareness and advocacy for open textbooks. This includes providing training for instructors adopting open resources, peer reviews of open textbooks, and mentoring online professional networks that provide support to authors who open their resources. Through our community outreach, we have found that open textbooks should be: easy to use, get and pass around, editable so instructors can customize content, cross-platform compatible, printable, and accessible so they work with adaptive technology."

"A report issued by the United States Government Accountability Office on June 6th confirms a trend of the educational publishing industry: textbook costs to students at higher education institutions are rising 6% per year on average, and have risen 82% over the last decade. The study, ordered by Congress, looks at the efforts of publishers and colleges to increase the availability of textbook price information and "unbundled" buying options as required under provisions in the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 (HEOA"

Good article on the emergence of e-textbooks in education and the affordances they offer.

"We are the world's largest publisher of free and open college textbooks. With our ever-expanding catalog of top quality books by expert authors, now is your chance to be a hero and help your students save thousands of dollars. Get started today and join the textbook affordability movement."

Digital curation tools and techniques

Open textbooks - the new wave after Moocs?

"TRADITIONAL textbooks will be put on the endangered list next year as the University of Adelaide's Faculty of Science becomes the first tertiary institution to embrace a new approach to online learning." Ahh you need an iPad to do elearning in science, that's the problem.

"Connexions is a dynamic digital educational ecosystem consisting of an educational content repository and a content management system optimized for the delivery of educational content. Connexions is one of the most popular open education sites in the world. Its more than 17,000 learning objects or modules in its repository and over 1000 collections (textbooks, journal articles, etc.) are used by over 2 million people per month. Its content services the educational needs of learners of all ages, in nearly every discipline, from math and science to history and English to psychology and sociology. Connexions delivers content for free over the Internet for schools, educators, students, and parents to access 24/7/365. Materials are easily downloadable to almost any mobile device for use anywhere, anytime. Schools can also order low cost hard copy sets of the materials (textbooks)."

Plugins to support text book authoring. Designed for the open textbook project.

Tony Bates on the Open Textbook summit.

Why Open Textbooks are an answer (at least)

Starter page for the Open Textbook project in BC Canada. Very useful stuff.

Wiley shows how astronomical the cost of online textbooks is.

'tailored' textbooks with mashups of content

David Wiley on why the Apple iBooks announcement is great for open textbooks - although not in the way that big publishers want or have yet perceived.

"The University of Minnesota College of Education and Human Development has saved students $145,000 on textbooks over three semesters through its iPad initiative and 140-volume open textbook library, the Minnesota Daily reported earlier this month."

"OpenStax College offers students free textbooks that meet scope and sequence requirements for most courses. These are peer-reviewed texts written by professional content developers. Adopt a book today for a turnkey classroom solution or modify it to suit your teaching approach. Free online and low-cost in print, OpenStax College books are built for today's student budgets."

Open textbook from Tony Bates on integrating technology into teaching - free download in a range of formats

Examination of the Boundless textbooks case by asking the question, 'What is unique in a foundational text book?'