From Open Knowledge Foundation

Working Group on Open Textbooks

Purpose

1. Act as a central point of reference and support for people interested in open textbooks.
2. Organise events for those interested in open textbooks
3. Document existing open textbooks and open textbook projects
4. Act as a hub for the development of low cost, community driven open textbook projects

Possible Projects

• Open textbook prize
• Maintain a shared registry of open textbooks
• Open textbook RSS aggregator
  • See: friendfeed.com/rooms/opentextbooks
• Collection of case studies?
• Versioned repository of existing open textbooks
  • See: opentextbook.org/repository/

Created: 2008-11-18

Project Members

• Karen Fasimpaur, K12 Open Ed
• Katherine Fletcher, Connexions
• Amee Evans Godwin, Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education
• Jonathan Gray, The Open Knowledge Foundation
• Professor David Joyner, USNA + Open Source Mathematics
• Alex Kozak, Creative Commons
• Rufus Pollock, The Open Knowledge Foundation
• Chris Watkins, Appropedia
• Andrew Whitworth, Wikibooks

Status: Active

Participate

• Join the mailing list http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/opentextbooks
• Email info [at] okfn [dot] org.

See also =

Some alternative sites:

All/unknown target:

• UnCollege, A collection of self learning resources.
• Flat World Knowledge, seems to be a bit of a curated catalogue
• Wikieducator, free e-learning content.
• OER Commons has a list of 200+ text books, each with licence info in detail
• Connexions - "a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc. Anyone may view or contribute:"
• OpenCourseWare Consortium "is a collaboration of higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model."

Higher education

• Jorum "learning to share", a site hosted in the UK
• JISC catalogue
• MIT Open Courseware Over 2000 MIT courses that are free to participate in
• Open Yale Courses, provides lectures and other materials from selected Yale College courses to the public free of charge via the internet. The courses span the full range of liberal arts disciplines, including humanities, social sciences, and physical and biological sciences.

Other indexes of books:

• Library Genesis has catalogue of over 300,000 titles
• Project Gutenberg Free and open eBooks, from many publishers, mostly out of copyright material.
• The Internet Archive Home to thousands of out of print or open source material, including books.
• Open Library Open Project with the goal of creating one web page for every book ever published.
• InTechOpen Read, download & share more than 850 free scientific books. It's free for everyone, anywhere in the world