Free Open Source Textbooks Growing in Popularity in College Classes

http://business.time.com/2012/08/10/free-textbooks-shaking-up-higher-education/

by KeepTalking • 14 years ago

44 9 14 years ago

business.time.com

japhyr• 14 years ago

These business models sound reasonable, as long as the supporting materials are truly supplemental. An open textbook that is complete (for example, with problems and exercises), is a good thing. If the text becomes an advertisement for the supplemental materials, then we have missed the mark.

jimhefferon• 14 years ago

> then we have missed the mark

I don't agree. I have offered an open text, including free supplemental materials, for 15 years (so I think I have some credibility). But other people want to do other things. Free is Free for the authors as well as for the readers. If someone wants to have a go at giving away a text and selling the slides for classroom use then I wish them luck. If students and teachers find that useful then good.

saryant3• 14 years ago

The CS department I was in (at a small liberal arts college) often used either textbooks written by one of the professors or previous editions.

The use of previous editions was great. It's not like discrete math changes that much anyways so using a copy we could get off Amazon for $1.70 was a great help compared to departments asking us to spend $80-200 on a brand new book.

Several professors also wrote their own books and just tossed the PDF on their website. One professor wrote a book on Scala for intro to CS classes, another on numerical calculus, a third (no longer in use) on Java and OOP for freshman.

I'm sure this isn't the only CS department in the world with this tradition but it's one that works very well. While you certainly run in to the issue of bad professors forcing subpar work on students, if you've got profs you can trust with the job the results, IME, can be quite good and better than commercially available texts.

jmduke• 14 years ago

Even when professors don't recommend a previous edition, dropping from the sixth edition to the fifth edition (especially in humanities courses) will save you hundreds of dollars at the expense of usually the chapters being slightly out of order.

loganfrederick• 14 years ago

Where did you go to school!?

fqqv• 14 years ago

> One professor wrote a book on Scala for intro to CS classes

Is it publicly available ?

saryant3• 14 years ago

It should be on bookshelves soon but I don't know if the PDF is online publicly.

If you're interested, the class schedule with lecture notes for last spring's course is here: http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~mlewis/CSCI1320-S12/

Free Open Source Textbooks Growing in Popularity in College Classes

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