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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
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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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