Open Education Resources / Open Textbooks
I had a discussion the other day with a couple colleagues where the issue of textbook costs arose. I am a huge advocate of open educational resources and open textbooks (see If You Believe in “Intellectual Property”, How Do You Teach Others? – Answer: you can’t). I also know from my consulting work in the 1990’s that there’s no real reason why textbooks should be as expensive as they are today. Print-on-demand can bring the costs down dramatically.
So I thought I would add a few links to the blog for those interested in getting started investigating the idea:
- Open Educational Resources (OER) Commons
- Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources
- Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources – Member List
- California Open Textbook Project
- Connexions
- a good video & post about Dispelling Myths about Open Textbooks
- Two publishers doing good stuff:
Finally, I have new post at my economics blog about the Economic Alchemy: How to Raise Tuition but Lower Student Costs. Also, I advise that people not confuse “online books” with “low-cost” or “open”. Yes, “open textbooks” and newer low-cost books can be put online. But the “online books” being promoted by the major oligopoly publishers are NOT low-cost solutions. In practice, they major publisher solutions like CourseSmart actually end up raising student costs. For more about that, see my post on Online Books.