More sources for Open Textbooks

I noted in my last text about open educational resources that it was hard to find actual textbooks. However, just today Tom Caswell from the Open Course Library sent out 3 new resources for Open Textbooks. Sweet!

Here are 3 new tools for your OER toolbox:

1.       Open Stax College (http://openstaxcollege.org/) – offers students free textbooks that meet scope and sequence requirements for most courses. These are peer-reviewed texts written by professional content developers. Adopt a book today for a turnkey classroom solution or modify it to suit your teaching approach. Free online and low-cost in print, OpenStax College books are built for today’s student budgets.

2.       Online Textbook Adoption Tool – Akademos recently launched a new textbook adoption tool at http://adoption.akademos.com/.  They want to add more Open Textbooks to their reviews, and I’m working with them to line up some promotional codes that will give faculty reviewers a $40 credit in TextbookX.com. They ask that those interested please leave reviews on two books (1-2 paragraphs for each book) and fill out the rating rubric. I’ll send the codes out when they come.

3.       Open Academics textbook catalog (http://open.umn.edu) – a great effort out of the University of Minnesota to create a peer reviewed catalog of open textbooks. U of M's press release is below.  There's also a great story on NPR: http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2012/04/23/university-open-source-textbooks