FREE & Open Textbooks making inroads

WOW – check the new numbers coming out of Flat World Knowledge – a new open textbook publisher … where one of the options available to students is: FREE.

“We've gone from 30 schools and 1,000 students this past spring, to 430 schools and 40,000 students this fall, using Flat World textbooks.”

Several of our college faculty were involved in early reviews of their open textbooks.

There are other interesting open textbook publisher models emerging: CK-12 is doing great work in the K-12 space.

FREE Calculus Textbook anyone? California (Free Digital Textbook Initiative Report) will likely adopt several of CK-12’s open textbooks and save the State of California a lot of money.

Welcome to education’s (yes, K-20) inexorable path to openness.

How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education

Great article!

The architects of education 2.0 predict that traditional universities that cling to the string-quartet model will find themselves on the wrong side of history, alongside newspaper chains and record stores. "If universities can't find the will to innovate and adapt to changes in the world around them," professor David Wiley of Brigham Young University has written, "universities will be irrelevant by 2020."

New Tuition-Free 'University of the People' Tries to Democratize Higher Ed

Chronicle Article

"The latest experiment in peer-to-peer education kicks off next month – a new institution in which students will learn in virtual communities using free online materials and social-networking tools. But now the venture, called University of the People, faces big questions. Among them: Can it get accreditation? And can a college that charges so little and relies so much on self-teaching retain students?"

'The World Is Open'

A long but worthwhile interview with Curtis Bonk.

Questions discussed include:

Q: How do you define "open" with regard to educational movements? Free? Open to all? Should it also include the ability to earn credit?

Q: How significant, in your opinion, is MIT's OpenCourseWare project in pushing this movement?

Q: How do you see the availability of educational materials from established universities changing the way education is provided in developing nations? How crucial is it to have someone directly connected to students who is also involved as a guide to the materials?

Q: Some traditionalists in higher education equate online and free with a lack of quality and an erosion of standards. How would you respond?

Q: Movements like Wikipedia involve sharing knowledge, but without the traditional vetting that is found in higher education. Academics seem to be evolving from anger at Wikis to either acceptance or some embracing of the concept. What do you make of it?

Q: What are a few ways you expect these movements to change higher education in another 10 or 20 years?

CA Free Digital Textbook Initiative Report

California is reviewing open textbooks for public K-12:

Free Digital Textbook Initiative Review Results

Download the entire Free Digital Textbook Initiative Report

P2P U., an Experiment in Free Online Education, Opens for Business

http://chronicle.com/blogPost/P2P-U-an-Experiment-in-Free/7739/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

A group of professors and graduate students from around the world has started a new university of their own online, with an unusual model that is more like a book group than a traditional course.

The new institution, called Peer2Peer University (for peer to peer), was announced last year and was originally slated to start offering courses in January. But logistical issues forced the fledgling project to delay its official opening until last week.

The courses do not have a traditional professor at the front of the virtual classroom. Instead, a facilitator (who volunteers his or her time) manages online discussoins, but students are expected to essentially teach one another (and themselves). Sessions last only six weeks, to help nontraditional students fit the courses into their schedules. No credit will be granted by P2P University.

The fall semester features six courses: "Behavioral Economics and Decision Making," "Copyright for Educators," "Introduction to Cyberpunk Literature," "Land Restoration and Afforestation," "Neuroethics and International Biolaw," "Open Creative Nonfiction Writing," and "Poker and Strategic Thinking."

New Program Seeks to Make Alternative Textbooks for Visually Impaired Students Available Faster

http://chronicle.com/blogPost/New-Program-Seeks-to-Make/7742/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

While music-recording companies have been fighting people who illegally share songs, book publishers are looking to expand file-sharing for college students with print-related disabilities.

Open Textbooks Gaining Ground: Flat World in 400 Colleges

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/open_textbook_program_gaining_ground.php

Flat World Knowledge is announcing record numbers on their open text book program. As of this coming September, more than 40,000 college students at more than 400 colleges will access the publisher's e-learning services and textbooks. Business and economics professors from across the country are flocking to the site to meet their students' needs. Given that the program started in Spring 2009, with only 1000 textbooks sold to 30 colleges, the growth for Fall 2009 is phenomenal.

Education at the Crossroads

Worth a read:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/08/education-at-the-crossroads.html

Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0

Great article in Educause Review.

The Brewing Perfect Storm of Opportunity

Fortunately, various initiatives launched over the past few years have created a series of building blocks that could provide the means for transforming the ways in which we provide education and support learning. Much of this activity has been enabled and inspired by the growth and evolution of the Internet, which has created a global “platform” that has vastly expanded access to all sorts of resources, including formal and informal educational materials. The Internet has also fostered a new culture of sharing, one in which content is freely contributed and distributed with few restrictions or costs.

Arguably, the most visible impact of the Internet on education to date has been the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement, which has provided free access to a wide range of courses and other educational materials to anyone who wants to use them. The movement began in 2001 when the William and Flora Hewlett and the Andrew W. Mellon foundations jointly funded MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative, which today provides open access to undergraduate- and graduate-level materials and modules from more than 1,700 courses (covering virtually all of MIT’s curriculum). MIT’s initiative has inspired hundreds of other colleges and universities in the United States and abroad to join the movement and contribute their own open educational resources.⁴ The Internet has also been used to provide students with direct access to high-quality (and therefore scarce and expensive) tools like telescopes, scanning electron microscopes, and supercomputer simulation models, allowing students to engage personally in research.

The latest evolution of the Internet, the so-called Web 2.0, has blurred the line between producers and consumers of content and has shifted attention from access to information toward access to other people. New kinds of online resources—such as social networking sites, blogs, wikis, and virtual communities—have allowed people with common interests to meet, share ideas, and collaborate in innovative ways. Indeed, the Web 2.0 is creating a new kind of participatory medium that is ideal for supporting multiple modes of learning.