Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Open Education Resources - Free Math Textbooks

Infinitesimal Calculus 5Image via WikipediaCable Green was featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education in an article called "State of Washington to Offer Online Materials as Texts" by Martha Ann Overland. I loved the article because it promotes all of the things I am so excited about in education right now: free, openly licensed textbooks, open education resources, and the creation of communities that are creating freely accessible learning materials. It is a well-written and balanced article that discusses the promise and possibilities of OER as well as the problems


I was surprised to see that they were having problems finding math resources: "During a recent meeting of mathematics professors and librarians who are designing the courseware for Washington's algebra, precalculus, and statistics courses, it was clear that no one was completely satisfied with what could be found online." 


I work at College of the Redwoods where the Math department has created a couple of textbooks and I received an email from David Nelson who is the project manager for the Florida Distance Learning Consortium to let me know about the free pre-algebra textbooks at the Stitz-Zeager website (this looks like an excellent collection).


There is also a free webinar happening on Thurs. Jan. 13th on a free online math textbook at The Stitz-Zeager Open Access Precalculus Project.


There are links to College of the Redwoods open math textbooks in this post here:
http://cain.blogspot.com/2010/08/good-teaching-is-accessible-and-open.html
Enhanced by Zemanta

No comments:

Post a Comment