Oer september16presentation final. Open Textbooks. Releases photos under a Creative Commons licence. Licences specify the terms and conditions under which things can be used.
All too frequently in everyday life we come across restrictive licences that actually seem to discourage usage, disallowing copying or sharing. But a whole other family of free licences aim to encourage use and sharing, asking simply for proper recognition and reciprocal behaviour in return. Since its inception, CERN has used the web to share multimedia material openly. To signal clearly that we wanted people to use our photos and videos we crafted a pioneering free media licence.
Online education resources gain footing in colleges via open textbooks. Recent surveys by the National Association of College Stores suggest annual student spending on course materials is decreasing with the emergence of alternatives to retail, from textbook sharing and rentals to e-books and online resources.
Click through the gallery to find find out how students are getting around paying top dollar for course materials. Students can generally rent a textbook for between 33% and 55% of the cost of a new printed text, according to the NACS. Most college bookstores offer a service through which students can rent course materials and return them at the end of the year.
Amazon, Barnes & Noble and a handful of online platforms also offer the service. 5 Places to Get Digital Textbooks. An Open Web. Book:Lists/Subjects - TextbookRevolution. Free-textbooks project helps SA. AN innovative education project has enabled the government to print more than 2.4 -million free maths and science textbooks for a nominal cost.
The project also allows pupils from Grade 10 to 12 to download the books free - and provides videos and presentations that they can source via the internet or on their cellphones. The textbooks are written by an army of volunteers, many of whom are PhDs , and are provided free of charge to schools. The initiative - called Siyavula - is the brainchild of Mark Horner, 35. Horner's project is a labour of love that began in 2002 when he ran a project with graduate students at the University of Cape Town. 350,000 Textbooks Downloaded From Apple's iBooks in Three Days - John Paczkowski. Though nascent and unproven, Apple’s new textbook initiative appears to be gaining lots of momentum — and quickly, too.
Within days of its debut, Apple’s iBooks textbook store had already racked up a significant number of downloads. Same thing with the company’s textbook authoring tool. According to Global Equities Research, which monitors Apple’s iBook sales via a proprietary tracking system it doesn’t much care to discuss, more than 350,000 textbooks were downloaded from the company’s iBooks Store within the first three days of availability (caveat: a number of these may well have been free copies of E.O. Wilson’s Life on Earth downloaded for free by folks interested in seeing an iPad textbook in action) 150 Free Textbooks: A Meta Collection.
Free textbooks (aka open textbooks) written by knowledgable scholars are a relatively new phenomenon.
Below, find a meta list of 200 Free Textbooks, and check back often for new additions. Also see our online collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities. Art History A Textbook of the History of Painting by John Charles Van Dyke, Rutgers Biology. California Effort Wants to Make College Textbooks Free - Education. Paying for college textbooks could become more affordable for cash-strapped California students.
State senator Darrell Steinberg plans to introduce two bills in the next legislative session that would eliminate pricey textbooks and bring the open-source revolution to the Golden State. Steinberg’s first bill would create 50 open-source textbooks for all the core classes required for lower-division coursework. Students would be able to access the books for free via their computer or their mobile phones. In Washington State, the End of $200 Textbooks Is Here - Education. For college students everywhere feeling the pinch of the cost of textbooks, there's good news: the end of the $200 textbook might be on its way.
A new initiative in Washington state, the Open Course Library, represents a huge step in the right direction. The goal of the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges project is to boost college completion rates by making higher education more affordable. 150 Free Textbooks: A Meta Collection.