Re: open access textbooks?

[Jean-Claude Guedon <jean.claude.guedon@umontreal.ca>]

Jim,

There are several projects dealing with high school textbooks
(and these may be more important for the Third World than college
textbooks), for example:

http://www.opensourcetext.org/index.htm

http://www.fhsst.org/

There are also textbooks and reference books in the health area
sponsored by the Federal University in Sao Paulo

http://www.unifesp.br/universidade/english/dis/libraries/books.htm

Rice University has an interesting model for sharing educational
resources and build them up, presumably to textbook levels:

http://cnx.org/

In the same train of thought (on-line open access to course
materials and elements susceptible of entering into textbooks)
there are all the obvious sources such as Open Courseware at MIT,
or Open Courseware Consortium (http://www.ocwconsortium.org/)
that will have its meeting next April in China.

Other possibilities include CCLearn
(http://learn.creativecommons.org ), Wikiversity
(http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Main_Page ). In
Virginia, the Joint Commission on Technology and Science deals
with similar issues (http://jcots.state.va.us/2007%
20Content/openeducation.htm ), The Hewlett Foundation supports
OER Commons (http://www.oercommons.org/ ) and the ten best French
engineering schools offer their courses in French and English
(http://www.paristech.org/fr/etudier_libres.html ).

I am sure there are dozens of similar projects and it might
become interesting to federate them.

Best regards,

Jean-Claude Guedon