Open Source Textbooks

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Contents

Introduction

We are all used to the idea of free public lending libraries. Benjamin Franklin helped to get this idea started in the United States well over 200 years ago.

Moreover, the idea of free public schools is well accepted. Thus, it is not too great a leap to have a vision of education and educational materials being made available free to people of all ages throughout the world.

Of course, we have a very long way to go in achieving such a vision. The countries of the world vary considerably in how well they embrace and work to achieve this vision.

The Internet and rapidly improving telecommunications access and facilities throughout the world has brought a new dimension to the idea of universal, free education. A great many people are willing and able to create educationally sound materials and make them available free on the Web.

You know, of course, that someone has to pay to have free public libraries. Similarly, the Internet is not free. However, the Internet if paid for by a very large number of organizations and institutions, so the cost is widely distributed. Moreover, it costs to access the Internet. However, there are many places (such as public libraries, schools, many restaurants, and so on) where this cost is not directly charged to the people using the service.

There are a growing number of projects that focus on providing free textbooks and other reading material that is specifically written for students in courses and/or for people who just want to learn on their own. The idea is both relatively simple and a major paradigm shift in educational publishing. The idea is to write educational textbooks and pieces of textbooks, and make them available as free, open source materials on the Web.

This is a worldwide effort. Quoting from the 2007 Cape Town Open Education Declaration.

We are on the cusp of a global revolution in teaching and learning. Educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use. These educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. They are also planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together, deepening their skills and understanding as they go.
This emerging open education movement combines the established tradition of sharing good ideas with fellow educators and the collaborative, interactive culture of the Internet. It is built on the belief that everyone should have the freedom to use, customize, improve and redistribute educational resources without constraint. Educators, learners and others who share this belief are gathering together as part of a worldwide effort to make education both more accessible and more effective.

Historically, many teachers have developed good quality materials for use in their teaching, and have shared these materials with their fellow teachers. Many teachers share lesson plans or ideas for lesson plans. A huge number of teacher-developed lesson plans are available free on the Web.

However, except in rare cases, there is a major difference between a lesson plan and the textual materials (both for the students and for the teacher) that one finds in high quality, commercially-published materials. What is gradually beginning to happen is that some teachers are writing such commercially-publishable materials, and making them available free on the Web.

I (David Moursund) have been doing this for about a half-dozen years. As you can see in my Professional Vita, I have published more than 40 books commercially. Nowadays, all of the education books I write are made available free on the Web in PDF and Microsoft Word formats. Twelve of these books have been published during the past six years. Most are designed for use in teacher education, focusing on the area the general area of information and Communication Technology.

Clearly, An international Movement

The long term visionary goal is that education is something that is a basic human right and that a substantial amount of free education should be available to everybody. The worldwide one-laptop-per-child movement is an example of what is to come. The world has the resources to to provide every child with a networked laptop computer computer. One approach to this huge project is illustrated by the "$100 laptop" project. While the cost of manufacturing these machines is not yet down to $100, there are good indications that this will occur within the next three years.

Educational materials for use on inexpensive computers are being made available through large projects, through top-down approaches, and through the generous work of a large number of individuals. Here is an example of a top-down approach that is discussed in the April 23, 2008 issue of the Jakarta Post.

How do you make school textbooks cheaper? The government has turned to a combination of old traditions and modern technology to beat book prices, considered one of the sources for the high cost of education in this country. Let's hope it works.
The new book policy, introduced in 2005 but for some reason still not widely known to the public, involves lengthening the shelf life of a book to a minimum of five years, buying up the copyrights of as many school textbooks as the government can afford and uploading them in digital form to the Internet and making them available for free download to those who need them. ...
The government has allocated Rp 20 billion (US$2.19 million) this year to buy the copyrights of widely used school textbooks and upload them to the Internet.
Students will then be free to download and print the books. The government is even encouraging people to print them out and resell them, knowing they cannot charge too much or people will simply turn to the original source. With the One Laptop For Every Child concept soon coming to Indonesia, perhaps there will be no need for anyone to print books, with e-books taking over. ...

Publishing Textbook Types of Materials

Currently, relatively few teachers are sharing textbook-like materials on the Web. Here are some possible reasons for this:

  1. Many teachers are not comfortable with the quality of their own writing. Many find that writing for public consumption is both painful and—sometimes—embarrassing. They lack easy access to content editors and copy editors, and often do not feel comfortable in asking for such help from their fellow teachers.
  2. From the point of view of many teachers, publishing on the Web is far more frightening than just running off a few photocopies to share with friends. (This may be vaguely related to the fact that many teachers are most comfortable in their teaching when their classroom door is closed and there are no visitors. At the same time, they freely discuss teaching strategies with their fellow teachers.)
  3. Publishing on the Web requires knowledge and skills that a great many teachers do not have. Moreover, readers are gradually expecting an increasing level of quality in the publication of such "professional" materials. In addition, publishing one's materials on the Web tends to carry with it some responsibility to keep the materials up to date.
  4. Developing and writing high quality materials takes a lot of time. Many teachers feel that they do not have the time for such activities. Moreover, the "reward" system in education often offers little encouragement to teachers who might do such work. This is true at both the precollege level and in higher education.

Free, But Not Open Source

Free and Open Source do not mean the same thing. The Wikipedia provides a good example of Web content that is both free and open source. The Wikipedia advertises itself as "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." Moreover, "All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License."

The purpose of this License is to make a manual, textbook, or other functional and useful document "free" in the sense of freedom: to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either commercially or noncommercially. Secondarily, this License preserves for the author and publisher a way to get credit for their work, while not being considered responsible for modifications made by others

Contrast this with materials that one can read for free, but that are copyrighted with some or major restrictions on copying, modifying, and distributing.

There are many sources of free books. Currently, there are a number of Open Content projects that are scanning millions of books and making them available online. Some of the books (especially, those out of copyright) are available free.

Free Books and Journals

There are a number of ongoing projects to provide free books on the Web.

Similarly, there are a large number of journals that are published electronically and made available free on the Web. Especially for students in higher education, open access journals may well be part of the content in a course. See the Directory of Open Access Journals. Quoting from this Website:

Welcome to the Directory of Open Access Journals. This service covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. We aim to cover all subjects and languages. There are now 3,340 journals in the directory. Currently 1,136 journals are searchable at article level. As of today 181,654 articles are included in the DOAJ service.

In addition to the open access journals, many students have free access to online journals that charge a subscription fee. That is because many institutions pay subscription fees and then make the e-journals available free to their students and faculty.

The National Academies Press both sells its books and makes many of them available free online. As of 2008, about 3,700 books were available free online. Many of these are suitable for use in teaching.

Graphics Books. See http://4ebooks.org/graphic-ebooks. The collection here includes the 251 page book "Mathematics for Computer Graphics" (Second Edition) by John Vince.

Many colleges and universities pay for licenses or subscriptions for a wide range of online resources. They make these resources available free to their students, faculty, and staff. Such resources tend to have a permanency that makes them useful in courses that will be taught a number of times.

Newspapers (Google)

Helft, Miguel (9/8/08). Google to Digitize Newspaper Archives. The New York Times. Retrieved 9/11/08: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/09/technology/09google.html. Quoting from the article:

Google said it was working with more than 100 newspapers and with partners like Heritage Microfilm and ProQuest, which aggregate historical newspaper archives in microfilm. It has already scanned millions of articles.

Other companies are already working with newspapers to digitize archives and some sell those archives to schools, libraries and other institutions, helping newspapers earn money from their historical content.

The National Digital Newspaper Program, a joint program of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress, is creating a digital archive of historically significant newspapers published in the United States from 1836 to 1922. It will be freely accessible on the Internet.

Some Local and National Writing Projects

The Wikipedia provides a good example of collaborative writing of materials that are now widely used by students. However, these materials were not specifically written for specific courses at specific grade levels.

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has committed major funding to the Open Textbook movement. On March 17, 2008 they awarded $10,075, 000 to a variety of projects.

Here are some examples of projects that are specifically aimed at students (and their faculty) in our K-12 and higher education systems.

Community College Consortium

Quoting from the Website http://cccoer.wordpress.com/:

The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) is a joint effort by the Foothill-De Anza Community College District, the League for Innovation in the Community College and many other community colleges and university partners to develop and use open educational resources (OER) in community college courses.

Connexions Project

Richard Baraniuk is a Professor at Rice University and Director of the Connexions project. He is a leader in the open-source learning movement. Goodbye, textbooks; hello, open-source learning is a 19 minute video in which Baraniuk discusses the project.

The Connexions project is assembling a large collection of relatively current college level academic materials that the authors make available under a Creative Commons license. These materials are then available for viewing on the Web, organization into textbooks for students to use free on the Web or to print, and for printing hard copy bound books at a relatively modest cost.

College Textbooks

http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/. This site provides a variety of college level textbooks free online and at relatively modest prices for hardcopy.

Reusable Learning Objects

"The main idea of learning objects is to break educational content down into small chunks that can be reused in various learning environments, in the spirit of object-oriented programming." (David A. Wiley; Connecting Learning Objects to Instructional Design Theory.)

The general idea of a Reusable Learning Object is to create chunks (pieces) of computer based materials and code that can be in building instructional systems. Substantial progress has occurred in developing standards to help ensure that such chunks created by different people can readily be combined. In some cases, such material ios made available free.

Quoting from the Wikopedia entry on Learning Object:

A learning object is a resource, usually digital and web-based, that can be used and re-used to support learning.
Learning objects offer a new conceptualization of the learning process: rather than the traditional "several hour chunk", they provide smaller, self-contained, re-usable units of learning.[1]
They will typically have a number of different components, that range from descriptive data to information about rights and educational level. At their core, however, will be instructional content, and probably assessment tools. A key issue is the use of metadata.
Learning object design raises issues of portability, and of the object's relation to a broader learning management system.
…
Adapting a definition from the Wisconsin Online Resource Center, Robert J. Beck suggests that learning objects have the following key characteristics:
  • Learning objects are a new way of thinking about learning content. Traditionally, content comes in a several hour chunk. Learning objects are much smaller units of learning, typically ranging from 2 minutes to 15 minutes.
  • Are self-contained – each learning object can be taken independently.
  • Are reusable – a single learning object may be used in multiple contexts for multiple purposes.
  • Can be aggregated – learning objects can be grouped into larger collections of content, including traditional course structures
  • Are tagged with metadata – every learning object has descriptive information allowing it to be easily found by a search[1].

Wikibooks

The Wikibook project began in 2003. Its mission is to create a free collection of open-content textbooks that anyone can edit. The current collection contains both complete books and pieces of significant size.

For example, there is a complete 2005 book on Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience. If you are interested in general concepts of how your brain solves problems, read Chapter 2: Problem Solving from an evolutionary Perspective.

Free Tech Books

See http://www.freetechbooks.com/. The Website provides links to free books in Computer Science, Mathematics, Supporting Fields, Operating Systems, and Programming/Scripting. Quoting from this Website:

This site lists free online computer science, engineering and programming books, textbooks and lecture notes, all of which are legally and freely available over the Internet.
Throughout this site, other terms are used to refer to a book, such as ebook, text, document, monogram or notes.
What's the Catch?
None. All the books listed in this site are freely available, as they are hosted on websites that belong to the authors or the publishers.
Please note that (a) we do not host pirated books and (b) we do not link to sites that host pirated books and (c) we do not even link to sites that link to sites that host pirated books.
Please also note that each author and publisher has their own terms and conditions in the forms of free / open documentation licenses, public domain or other specific ones.
You are allowed to view, download and with a very few exceptions, print the books for your own private use at no charge. In fact, you are encouraged to tell others about the books.

Courses and Course Content

There are now a number of projects that are publishing detailed courses on the Web. Here are a few examples:

Welcome to UC College Prep Online, a statewide initiative of the University of California. UCCP develops and distributes high-quality courses and course content to benefit California students, with a special emphasis on helping underserved students prepare for college eligibility.
Beginning this academic year (2007), UCCP will make its best course content freely available to California students and teachers. At the same time, UCCP is developing exciting new online content and courses from the various UC campuses, programs and resources for use online and in schools.
In 2008, UCCP will debut an extensive online repository of courses, content and resources geared toward student interactivity and usage, as well as new platforms and formats for the instruction of UCCP courses. Please check this web site regularly for more information on new educational opportunities from UC College Prep Online.
MIT is committed to advancing education and discovery through knowledge open to everyone.
OCW shares free lecture notes, exams, and other resources from more than 1800 courses spanning MIT's entire curriculum.
  • A Google search on 5/2/08 of the term free online course materials produced about 1.8 million hits.


Other Related Open Source Topics

This web page focuses specifically on the topic of free open source textbooks and "chunks" of such material that can be assembled into the reading materials for a course. There are, of course, many other free open source materials that are relevant to students getting a good education. Here are lings to brief introductions to three of these areas:

References

A Google search on Open Source Textbook conducted on 5/1/2008 returned about 393,000 hits. It is clear that a very large number of people are interested in the idea of proving free textbooks and pieces of textbooks to teachers and students at both the precollege and higher education levels.

Here is a reference that you might find to be a useful starting point:

Crowell, Ben (n.d.). The Assayer. Retrieved 5/1/08: http://theassayer.org/. Quoting from this website:
The Assayer is the web's largest catalog of books whose authors have made them available for free. Users can also submit reviews. The site has been around since 2000, and is a particularly good place to find free books about math, science, and computers. If you're looking for old books that have fallen into the public domain, you're more likely to find what you want at Project Gutenberg.

Here are some additional references.

Cole, Gail (4/30/08). Textbook alternatives offer lighter burden for students. Oregon State University Daily Barometer. Retrieved 5/1/08: http://www.uwire.com/Article.aspx?id=796716.

Digital Filing cabinets.

globaltext.org. See http://globaltext.org/ for a Wiki-based project that has a goal of creating 1,000 computer technology books for distribution around the world.

Open Knowledge Foundation. Retrieved 5/1/08: http://www.okfn.org/. Quoting from the Website:

The Open Knowledge Foundation is a not-for-profit organization founded in 2004 with the simple aim of promoting (and protecting) open knowledge. It is our belief that open approaches to the production and distribution of knowledge can deliver far-reaching social and commercial benefits in a variety of areas.
What is Open Knowledge? Simply put: it is knowledge that is open! To be more specific, by knowledge we mean any kind of content, information or data: genes to geodata, sonnets to statistics. By 'open' knowledge we mean knowledge which anyone is free to use, re-use and redistribute without legal, social or technological restriction. For more details and a really precise explanation of what this means see the Open Knowledge Definition.

Patton, Charlesand Roschelle, Jeremy (5/6/2008). Why the Best Math Curriculum Won’t Be a Textbook. Education Week. retrieved 5/12/08: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/05/07/36patton.h27.html?print=1.

PlanetMath.org. Retrieved 12/27/08: http://planetmath.org/?op=browse&from=books. 159 college level math books. Quoting from the site:

All pages on this site are copyrighted by their respective authors.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify these documents under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".

Prabhu, Maya (2009). California considers open digital textbooks.

‘Open book examination' takes on new meaning as state officials aim to save schools money on curriculum materials. eSchoolNews. Retrieved 5/21/09: http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/index.cfm?i=58861

Santos, David A. (n.d.) OpenMathText.org. Retrieved5/8/08: http://www.openmathtext.org.

OpenMathText.org is a depository of free [college level], downloadable texts and is primarily dedicated to the specification, development, and dissemination of free, editable and downloadable mathematical texts aimed, mainly, at "just plain folk." OMTo invites registrants to discuss the site and its contents. math topics covered include: Linear Algebra, Calculus (Single Variable), Calculus (Multivariable), Discrete Math, Number Theory, Pre-Calculus, Probability.

Selby, Alan (n.d.). Appetizers and Lessons for Mathematics and Reason . Retrieved 8/14/08: http://whyslopes.com/etc/index.html. "A Calculus, Preparation for Calculus and Math Ed Reform etc. Website."

Author or Authors

The initial version of this page was developed by David Moursund

Retrieved from "http://iae-pedia.org/Open_Source_Textbooks"