textbooksfree.org
Please visit our other sites Education Economics and Reform Internet Library     Education Improvement Internet Library  
 Interesting Thoughts Concerning Education From The Expert and
Interesting Thoughts Concerning Society.
These sites have been prepared by Walter Antoniotti

Index

Free Textbooks and/or Course Notes

Free Courses

The Economics of College Textbooks

Publishers Fight Back

Free Textbooks Adoption Plan
Textbook Development Sites with Completed Textbooks
Textbook Development Sites with helpful text materials
Improving Free/Open  Textbooks
Interesting Free Textbook Ideas

Other Free Textbooks Advocates
Interesting Reading

Free Textbooks and/or Course Notes
Aussie Educator Textbooks-- has an extensive collection of textbooks and porthals
Business Textbook Internet Library-- many business areas
Creative Commons-- click on Find CC Licensed Work, enter the subject area
Economic Textbooks has books for economics majors and professionals.
Freeload Press has free college textbooks paid for with advertising.
Global Text Project-- click on the Books tab.
HippoCampus has audio/video lectures on Algebra, American Government, Biology, Calculus, Environmental Science, Physics, Religion, and U.S. History.
iLumina is a digital library of sharable undergraduate teaching materials for chemistry, biology, physics, mathematics, and computer science.
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (US)  provides access to content of the School's most popular courses.
Mathematics textbooks online maintained by George Cain, School of Mathematics, Georgia Institute of Technology
Free MBA Prerequisite Books and Notes-- many business areas
MIT OpenCourseWare
Nonbusiness Textbooks Internet Library
-- many academic areas
Online Books Internet Library --many areas, especially literature.
Open Course Ware Finder allows users to search six open courseware sites simultaneously.
Quick Notes Course Outlines
-- accounting, economics, statistics, mathematics
Saskatchewan University (CA) has general engineering class notes.
Textbook Revolution-- many diverse areas
Tufts OpenCourseWare
The Assayer coves many areas, specializes in math and science.
Wikibooks open-content textbooks
-- many diverse areas
Web-Books.Com
has over 1,000 free public domain e-book downloads.

Free Courses
National Repository of Online Courses-- high school, AP and college courses

Berkeley Webcasts
Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative
Johns Hopkins
Notre Dame
Sofia from Foothill-De Anza CC with testing material makes this truly a user friendly site.
Utah University

Utah Open Courseware Alliance
Yale Open Educational Resources Initiative 


OpenCourseWare Consortium has an extensive list of open courses by country.




Please E-mail us with information concerning how these free courses are being used.

The Economics of College Textbooks
Supply

Publishers create paper books to explain material requested by teachers.  Colleges sell to students at a 33% markup making a profit or sell bookstore rights to a national chain for instant profit and less management responsibility.

Demand

Students need something to study.
Teachers need material to teach and help developing and grading tests
The Used Textbook Market
More than ten years ago an extensive used textbook industry developed and student participants saved money.

Publishers Fight Back causing much higher prices
The used textbook market cut into publisher profit margins. Their response was more frequent edition changes. This, they hoped, would make textbooks indispensable. In courses where homework problems were an integral part of the textbook, problems were changed making used textbooks less useful. The added material increase printing cost, and caused numerous mistakes making the books less useful. Special publisher programs like the Thomson - Service Plus - Rewards and ThomsonNOW | Online learning and course management from Thomson ...   gave students an e-book option for about 60% of the cost of paper and allows teacher to automatically make a syllabus, tests, grades, and students can check grades. Also, according to the company, material to make learning easier was provided.
The bottom line
Changes made by publishers increase production cost meaning prices had to go up at a faster rate to maintain profit margins.

Anecdotal Information gathered over thirty-five years of teaching and ten years of selling books from the Quick Notes Learning System
series to about ten college bookstores.
 
If one hundred students sign up for a class, the bookstore orders about seventy books, returns ten books, buys back 40 books of which 30 look like new.

From a teacher's standpoint, the test bank is the most important ingredient.
Publishers make the testing process easier with test banks which can be taken and graded by a machine. The average professor teaches four classes per term with a total of 100 to 1,000 students. Final exam are given over a short period with grades due a few days after the exam period. The Professor, using the publishers test bank, selects questions and  prints the multiple choice test and answer sheet. A machine is used to grade the test. Bells and whistles like a grade distribution and test results by question are interesting, but superfluous.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Free Textbooks Adoption Plan
1) Students, working through an existing student group--student senate, economics club, business club, would form a committee.
2) Choose a basic course (Accounting, Economics, Statistics, Botany), where material tested is very generic.
3) The appropriate department would be asked to work with the committee in choosing an appropriate free textbook and tying the syllabus to the free textbook. In courses with extensive reading, the department would tie the reading list to one or two of the free sources. Where tests consist of problems, the department would choose a free textbook that has similar problems.
4)
Open Textbook Adoption by Judy Baker provides five steps for teachers wanting to adopt open textbooks.
5) Have the department create a department wide testing and grading mechanism. Once this is accomplished, teachers will not be dependent on publishers for this material and free e-textbooks can replace costly paper textbooks.
6) Schools should develop a Tech-based, Activity-driven educational system centered on student activity rather than lectures.

Example of how a professor from Illinois State University uses free textbooks.

Development Sites with Completed Textbooks
Global Text Project, originated by Dr. Richard Watson at the University of Georgia's Terry College of Business, allows users to contribute their thoughts to its collection of online textbooks. There will be editorial oversight states project co-leader Don McCubbrey, Clinical Professor in the Department of Information Technology and Electronic Commerce at the University of Denver's Daniels College of Business. The first two books will cover information systems and business fundamentals. Following the open-source concept means no copyright issues. Those wanting textbooks should click on the Books tab.
Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. Those looking for books should click on Find CC Licensed Work and enter the subject area in the search box.
OpenTextBook.org is a registry of textbooks and text book material that is open in accordance with the Open Knowledge Definition (OKD).
Wikibooks - offers over 30,000 open-content textbooks.

Development Sites with helpful text materials
Connexions
, from Rice University "... is a rapidly growing collection of free scholarly materials and a powerful set of free software tools to help, authors publish and collaborate, instructors rapidly build and share custom courses, learners explore the links among concepts, courses, and disciplines. View an in-depth introduction to Connexions in the TED2006 presentation by Connexions Founder Richard Baraniuk."
California Open Source Textbook Project (COSTP) is a collaborative, public/private undertaking. It has been created to address the high cost, content range, and consistent shortages of K-12 textbooks in California.
Open Educational Resources Commons is a teaching and learning network of shared materials, fro
m K-12 through college, from algebra to zoology, open to everyone.
TED2006 an in-depth introduction to Connexions presentation by its founder Richard Baraniuk.

Improving Free/Open Textbooks
1) Internet sites collecting materials should perform a rationing function separating interesting subject matter from actual textbooks. For example  Connexions correctly calls its material a collection of small "knowledge chunks". Too many sites do not separate textbooks from chunks.
2)  Sites too often go for quantity rather than quality.

3) Someone must develop easy to use testing materials currently provided by publishers. For examples
Sofia course material provides tests along with course notes and is ready to go while Wikibooks is developing some interesting material but no testing material is provided.
4) Studies show that students complain about costs but are slow to move to alternatives. A way must be found to use student inputs in the development of free Internet based textbooks. Please E-mail us with suggestions on rectifying this problem. Put  Student Acceptance in the Subject box.  


Interesting Free Textbook Ideas
Ohio State eases book-buying pain by putting selected books on line for their own students. The problem with this system is it lowers demand which will cause publishers to increase price to maintain margins.
socialbib - If you are a college student (,  you should try to get your textbooks for free. It is a great site that is free to join if you are a currently enrolled student.
World Public Library
Other Free Textbooks Advocates
TeleRead-- Advocating A Well-Stocked National Digital Library
Free Curricula Center produces and distributes university-level curricula that can be copied freely and modified cooperatively.
Open Knowledge Foundation-- Protecting and Promoting Open Knowledge in a Digital Age

Interesting Reading
New Study Outlines 12 Reasons for Soaring College Costs from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP)
Creative Commons Blog
Global Text Project Blog

TeleRead Blog
Are Copyrights a Textbook Scam: Alternatives to Financing Textbook Production in the 21st Century from the Center for Economic and Policy Research
“Textbook Prices Too Much, So UVSC Professor Eliminates Their Use,”
A Newly Emerging Infrastructure to Support Free Textbooks...
10 Tips: Be book smart when buying college texts


Please
E-mail us with comments and suggestions.

Thanks! Walter Antoniotti