Alt-Texts

A collective sigh of relief from college students and their parents is being heard across the country.

To ease the pain of climbing tuition rates and accumulating student loans, colleges are exploring ways to cut the cost of textbooks.

As most any college student or parent will tell you, a new textbook can easily cost over $150. When taking 4 classes, a student may need to shell out $600 or more.

At Frederick Community College here in Maryland, Mick O’Leary, the Executive Director of the Library, has brought together a group of faculty and administrators to explore the use of Alt-Texts (his term).

Alternative textbooks are electronic college-level textbooks. They may be open source (free!) or low cost alternatives to the traditional printed book. Students can either download and save the electronic text (usually in a PDF format) or pay a relatively small fee to have the publisher print, bind, and ship a copy.

Naturally, there are not electronic versions of most of the printed books found in a college bookstore. Publishers have to send their kids to college, too. Switching to an alt-text will usually require a college department to sift through a rapidly increasing number of alt-texts before deciding to switch books.

-Dave


Alt-Text Web Sites
Open-Source Textbooks and Other Materials

Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources
This is a clearinghouse for information and resources on “open educational resources” (OER) and open texts. Its primary goal is to identify, create, and/or repurpose existing (OER) as open textbooks and make them available for use by community college students and faculty. The site has list of OER Web sites, and list of open textbooks that may be suitable for use in community college courses. The list is arranged by discipline and has contains links to a few hundred texts in many disciplines.

Community College Open Textbook (CCOT) Project
The Community College Open Textbook (CCOT) Project is a one-year feasibility study in partnership with the Foothill-De Anza Community College District, the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE), Rice University’s Connexions, University of California College Prep (UCCP), Flat World Knowledge (FWK), California State University System’s California Digital Marketplace, the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), the High Tech Center Training Unit, and the Student PIRGs. The goals of the CCOT Project are to centralize critical open textbook information for use by community college professors and other interested parties and to document sustainable workflow approaches for producing, maintaining, and disseminating open textbooks. CCOT has a collection of 150 texts under review; the list itself is posted on the MERLOT site, described below.

Connexions
Connexions is an environment for developing, sharing, and publishing scholarly content on the Web. Its Content Commons contains educational materials for everyone — from children to college students to professionals — organized in small “modules” that are easily connected into larger “collections,” or books and courses. Connexions has also taken the next steps in the digital world by implementing permanent versioning: all content that has ever been placed into the Connexions repository is still in the repository. Connexions has several thousand small learning modules, and 400+ collections, covering all subjects.

Flat World Knowledge
Flat World Knowledge has text books for free online, and sells low cost supplements, including print, audio, by-the-chapter, and more. Its catalog has 27 books in business and related subjects.

Global Text Project
The Global Text Project will create open content electronic textbooks that will be freely available from a website.
It has 50 texts and other documents on variety of subjects.

Make Textbooks Affordable
This is a highly selective list from the “Make Textbooks Affordable” advocacy site in the above section. It has several dozen texts representing many disciplines, but with concentrations in math and science.

MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching)
MERLOT is a leading edge, user-centered, searchable collection of peer reviewed and selected higher education, online learning materials, catalogued by registered members and a set of faculty development support services. MERLOT's strategic goal is to improve the effectiveness of teaching and learning by increasing the quantity and quality of peer reviewed online learning materials. MERLOT has 200+ open texts in many disciplines.

The Open Knowledge Foundation Wiki: Open Textbooks List
This is a Webography of links to open text collections. It lists 17 sites, including comprehensive sites such as those described here, as well as specialized, single-topic lists.

Textbook Revolution
Textbook Revolution is the web’s source for free educational materials. This is a student-run, volunteer-operated website started in response to the textbook industry’s constant drive to maximize profits instead of educational value. TBR’s mission is to drive the adoption of free textbooks by teachers and professors.
It has 250+ textbooks and other educational documents and materials.

OER Commons
OER Commons is the first comprehensive open learning network where teachers and professors (from pre-K to graduate school) can access their colleagues’ course materials, share their own, and collaborate on affecting today’s classrooms. Open Education Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that are freely available online for everyone to use. Examples of OER include: textbooks, full courses, course modules, syllabi, lectures, homework assignments, quizzes, lab and classroom activities, games, and simulations. OER Commons has 100+ postsecondary textbooks on variety of subjects, as well as thousands of items on all subjects for K-12 and postsecondary.

Online Mathematics Textbooks
This one-person project lists seventy-two college university-level mathematics textbooks, course notes, and other documents. Many are legacy items.