I'll preface my laundry list of links here by saying that I'm working on a book about how technology can dramatically bring down the costs of education -- if we only let it do so.
There's a lot of government investment in free/open educational materials -- both textbooks and curricula sets. See here: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/26100 https://sites.google.com/a/sbctc.edu/opencourselibrary/ The second is particularly exciting. In a phone call with the WOCL team, they estimated that the single most-used open textbook that they're funding could save students upwards of $10 million over a two year span -- in Washington State alone. Here are a few OER platforms, for what it's worth: http://cnx.org/ http://www.oercommons.org/ I even did a little bit of work with Nature Publishing, who really understood that they needed to think about how to use and generate open educational materials. Their platform is here: http://www.nature.com/scitable And while we haven't gotten to a free accredited degree, Western Governors University (WGU) is getting pretty close. I talked to a graduate last week who paid a total of $4000 for his bachelors degree. It's pretty amazing. Paul On 18 April 2012 00:19, Owen Densmore <[email protected]> wrote: > Is your interest is the piracy angle? If so, there are lots of free and > open ebooks for just about any topic you might care about! But on the > other hand, they may not be the best suited to the class being taught. > > Amazingly enough, many profs are migrating to open/free sets of notes that > are equivalent to a book. The best example I know of is the > brilliant Mathematics For Computer Science > http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.042/fall10/mcs-ftl.pdf > And here is a huge selection of free or very inexpensive math books: > http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/mathematics.php > > In terms of torrents, I found a russian site that had 80,381 text books > that had been collected from world wide torrents and they had packaged > them for direct downloads. That's a lota books! Most were an edition or > two behind the latest, but still quite usable. > > Apple is starting to work very hard on textbooks for ipads, even with > means for "renting" them. They haven't gotten off the ground yet, but they > hope to be working with universities world wide within the year. > > I find that the "illegal" downloads I have done either leads me to buying > a version of the book (often a used edition, and an edition behind) or > deleting it. > > I do believe we need to make education freely available. Clearly Coursera > and Udacity are headed in that direction, with MITX following on their > heels. Accreditation is a problem, but being worked on for these digital > classrooms. > > -- Owen > > On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 10:21 AM, Joseph Spinden <[email protected]> wrote: > >> I came across an article I found interesting. I was curious about the >> reaction of the members of this group, if there is an interest. >> >> Joe >> >> http://www.aljazeera.com/**indepth/opinion/2012/02/** >> 2012227143813304790.html<http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/02/2012227143813304790.html> >> >> -- >> >> "Sunlight is the best disinfectant." >> >> -- Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, 1913. >> > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org > -- Paul Kruchoski @Kruchoski | 505.720.5260 | Schedule <http://doodle.com/kruchoski>
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
