California To Commission 50 Open Textbooks For 2013; Finnish Teachers Write One In A Weekend | Techdirt

Items tagged with oa.latex in Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) 2012-10-05

Summary:

Techdirt has been following open textbooks for some time now, and 2012 looks to be a bumper year for them. Here, for example, is a major initiative in the US: 'California college students hit with tuition increases in recent years will get a little financial help after Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation Thursday to create a website on which popular textbooks can be downloaded for free. Twin bills by Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) will give students free digital access to 50 core textbooks for lower-division courses offered by the University of California, California State University and California Community College systems. Hard copies of the texts would cost $20.' The bill establishes a new California Open Education Resources Council, which will be required to choose the 50 core textbooks and then: 'to establish a competitive request-for-proposal process in which faculty members, publishers, and other interested parties would apply for funds to produce, in 2013, 50 high-quality, affordable, digital open source textbooks' which would be released under a cc-by license. The move is likely to be significant nationally ... Meanwhile, in Finland, some teachers decided to produce something a little sooner: A group of Finnish mathematics researchers, teachers and students write an upper secondary mathematics textbook in a booksprint. The event started on Friday 28th September at 9:00 (GMT+3) and the book will be (hopefully) ready on Sunday evening.'  You can find the book's LaTeX source code in a repository on Github: it's under the same cc-by license as the California books, so you can adapt it freely -- if you can read Finnish...."

Link:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121003/07482720580/california-to-commission-50-open-textbooks-2013-finnish-teachers-write-one-weekend.shtml

From feeds:

[IOI] Open Infrastructure Tracking Project » Items tagged with oa.latex in Open Access Tracking Project (OATP)
Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.usa.ca oa.universities oa.textbooks oa.students oa.prices oa.oer oa.mathematics oa.licensing oa.libre oa.libraries oa.librarians oa.legislation oa.latex oa.hei oa.github oa.finland oa.courseware oa.copyright oa.comment oa.colleges oa.books oa.licensing oa.comment oa.legislation oa.universities oa.copyright oa.libraries oa.oer oa.textbooks oa.librarians oa.california creative_commons

Date tagged:

10/05/2012, 13:45

Date published:

10/05/2012, 09:45