The Price Is Still Right: 15 Sites for Free Digital Textbooks
We've collected an updated roster of resources that offer quality learning content without the high price tag of traditional texts.
- By Dian Schaffhauser
- 04/20/16
"Open" has gone mainstream. The world now celebrates Open Education Week. The U.S. Department of Education announced an "Open Education" or #GoOpen initiative and ran its first "@GoOpen Exchange" to get schools and educators committed to the use of open educational resources (OER). Students at Ithaca College, The College of William & Mary and Santa Barbara City College are all pushing their schools to adopt OER. Multiple colleges and universities are trying out no/low-cost OER degree programs. Amazon looks to be getting into the OER business with "Inspire." And a bipartisan group of Congressional staffers recently held a briefing to learn from experts why they should care about OER.
The demand for free learning content may be loud and clear now, but, back in 2013 when Campus Technology first surveyed the top sources for free digital textbooks, the OER world seemed a quieter, less tweeted place. What hasn't changed, though, is that faculty and students still want to know where to go to find the goods.
The following list offers 15 sources of quality digital content to use in your courses without worrying about the price tag.
BCcampus OpenEd
BCcampus OpenEd
In 2012, the province of British Columbia announced the "BC Open Textbook Project" and designated BCcampus to create a collection of open textbooks that could be used in the top 40 highest-enrollment subject areas. While many of the books and their ancillary resources have been adopted from other sites, the initiative has also produced its own OER textbooks. In many of the categories, BC faculty have reviewed the resources to give the local perspective.
College Open Textbooks
This collaborative effort among education, nonprofit and for-profit organizations affiliated with 200 colleges has set out to build OER awareness within two-year colleges. The site has peer-reviewed more than a hundred OER textbooks and provides links for hundreds more. COT isn't a repository, but its links to free textbooks by subject run from anthropology to statistics.
Global Text Project
Started when a group of educators created a Wikibook, this English and Spanish language collection includes some unique titles under-represented by other sources, such as CIO Handbook, Data Mining for the Masses, Game Programming and Practical Plastic Surgery for Nonsurgeons.