Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Tuesday, August 12, 2008

OA to widely-used textbook

Andy Guess, Open Textbook Meets Community Colleges, Inside Higher Ed, August 12, 2008.

... Connexions, a prominent online “open educational resources” hub based at Rice University, announced Monday that it has published a statistics textbook online that’s widely used in transfer-level community college courses. ...

The book, Collaborative Statistics by Barbara Illowsky and Susan Dean, is not only available as a full download. The content between the covers has been sliced and diced into “modules,” Connexions’ basic building blocks, that any student or instructor can rearrange or adapt for their own use. Developers of the project also plan on adding videos of class lectures by Illowsky as well as other supplementary classroom materials ...

“This is a big deal for community colleges because there are many students who can’t afford to go to school not necessarily because of tuition but because of the costs of textbooks and what have you ...” said Joel Thierstein, Connexions’ executive director.

He expects “close to 1,000 students in the fall” to be using the free version of the book in classes across the country. The text has been used for over a decade in California community colleges in courses accepted as transfer credits by the University of California system. ...

The authors first reacquired the rights to their book and published it themselves for a period, he said. More recently, the rights were transferred to Rice, which obtained them with backing from the Maxfield Foundation ... Connexions ... now offers the textbook content online under a Creative Commons license. Readers can also opt for an on-demand printed version, priced at $31.95.

The textbook was published in coordination with the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources ...

Update. See also this story from Wired Campus:
“We’re hoping that this is the first of many,” said Joel Thierstein, executive director of Connexions ...