Massachusetts Institute of Technology's OpenCourseWare has placed virtually its entire curricula online -- video lectures, problems sets and exams for more than 1,800 courses in 33 disciplines.
Other open-source textbook projects have a subversive edge. Founders or advocates refer to themselves as "co-conspirators," profess a do-it-yourself ethic and declare an intent to overthrow the textbook industry.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Thursday, August 21, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 2 inches; 61 words Type of Material: Correction
Pricey textbooks: An article in Monday's Section A about free online course materials challenging expensive college textbooks quoted Frank Lyman, executive vice president of CourseSmart, a commercial e-book company, as saying: "For all its popularity in the press and on blogs, [online textbooks are] all very marginal now." Lyman says he was referring to open-source textbooks, not to all online textbooks.
Wikibooks, a collection of textbooks "anyone can edit," is based on the popular Wikipedia model, which invites users to make and correct entries.
In one inmates-take-over-the-asylum scenario, Old Dominion College in Virginia had students compete to write chapters in a wikibook on the "Social and Cultural Foundations of American Education." Students voted for their favorites, and faculty chose the best versions.
More recently, academics have started embracing open- source resources as a way to reduce students' textbook bills. More than 1,400 faculty last year signed on to a pledge drive supporting open educational resources. (The drive was organized by Public Interest Research Groups from about 20 states.)
California State University is developing what it calls the Digital Marketplace, a website for selecting, comparing, sharing, approving and distributing both open-source and commercial online educational materials.
One of the biggest pushes for open educational resources has come from California community colleges, where students devoted nearly 60% of their education spending in 2007-08 to textbooks, according to a California State Auditor's report released last week.
The Foothill-De Anza Community College District in the Silicon Valley has teamed with the state's other two-year colleges to encourage faculty to create, use and select digital textbooks. The California Community Colleges Board of Governors voted in May to back open educational resources.
"One of the most heartbreaking things you can see is a student in the bookstore with a course catalog in one hand looking at the book prices to see what courses he can afford to take," said Hal Plotkin, a Foothill-De Anza trustee who was instrumental in the drive.
Several experts said a strong shift by California's public universities to open-source textbooks could be the jolt that brings them into wider use.
