A new web site has been created at the University of Minnesota to collect information about open textbooks. Take a look. You may be able to save your students some money without reducing the high quality of the education we provide to them.
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An average university student is assigned around $1,200 of textbooks each year. This isn't as big an issue at UM as it is at public institutions, particularly community colleges, but it is worth our consideration. If there is a way to reduce that cost without reducing the quality of education students obtain, we should consider it.
There is a large and growing open textbook movement, often being funded by state legislatures trying to reduce the cost of higher education. They are paying faculty members to write quality textbooks and then release them under the Creative Commons license. That usually means that you can use them, chop them up, and even modify them, as long as you credit the original author and make your material available under the same license.
As many of you know, it takes time to write a textbook, so these texts are just being finalized now and becoming available. Since there is no publisher, finding these texts can be difficult. The University of Minnesota is working to build a database of open textbooks. Because Minnesota is such a large school, because they are publicly financed, and because they are making this commitment to collect the information and add reviews and comments, I think this has a good chance of succeeding.
Registration for our Fall semester has already started, so we should have already submitted our textbook adoption lists, or at least submitted "To Be Determined," for every fall class at UM. I believe you can update and change adoptions if you want. I encourage you to take a look at the Minnesota web site right now and see if there is a text that your department could use in place of a more expensive alternative,particularly for your introductory survey courses. If there is, please share that information with the appropriate people in your area. If not, check back during the summer to see if more have been added. And check each semester to see whether this site can serve as your one stop reference for open textbooks.
If you made it this far, thank you. You also might be interested in checking out the featured WikiBooks to see if any books there can meet your needs. Wiki books are often written by groups of people, so the quality and voice might not be as consistent as a text written by one or two authors. But in the case of a survey course where the text is not necessarily the primary source of information, they may serve your needs. Take a look.
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Featured_books
Bill Vilberg - bill.vilberg@miami.edu, 786-250-2255
http://vilberg.com - Spreading seeds of education, technology, and more
