U. Minnesota promotes open textbooks - eCampus News | eCampus News

"In the past, Irene Duranczyk would assign her students a $180 textbook and hope they had the money to pay for it. Now, she still teaches the same introductory statistics class at the University of Minnesota. But the textbook is free. Duranczyk is one of a small but growing number of college professors who are literally throwing out their old textbooks and replacing them with free alternatives on the internet. For most college students, the idea of free textbooks may sound like a utopian fantasy, especially when surveys show they can expect to pay $1,200 a year for books and supplies. But in the past few years, dozens of open textbooks have been created, or adapted, online for a wide range of college courses — psychology, history, economics, foreign languages ..."