OER: Possible Resources for Biology - Human Anatomy & Physiology

human anatomy (Photo credit: Shira Golding)

These are some possible resources for developing our own textbook and course for anatomy and physiology. I will use this wiki this summer to sort through some biology textbooks and OERs for possible use in BIOL 102 Human Biology. Remember that since these are openly licensed we can mix these materials anyway we want to meet your course goals and objectives. I will also be looking at possible lab kits and other solutions.

Open Textbooks

• OpenStax - OpenStax textbooks are freely available in .pdf and they also have a low-cost, print-on-demand option.

• Biology
• Concepts of Biology
• Anatomy and Physiology

• WikiBooks

• Anatomy and Physiology
• IB Biology Review Guide (good for some of the illustrations)

• Boundless

• Boundless Biology Open Textbook

• Open Learning Initiative (Carnegie Mellon University) Their textbook is in their class. You can access it as a guest by clicking on the blue "Enter Course" button

• Anatomy and Physiology

• Utah State Office of Education
• Biology (adapted from a CK12 book)
• Open Source Library (WA State)
• Bio 100 - Survey of Biology (click on "Browse")
• Human Anatomy & Physiology 1
• Human Anatomy & Physiology 2
• Bruce Forceia
• eText of Human Anatomy and Physiology
• Wendy Riggs
• Biology 1 (SP12)

Open Education Resources (OER)

• CK12
• Biology (include short video demonstrations)
• Khan Academy
• Biology Videos
• MERLOT (content builder)
• Anatomy and Physiology I
• The Biology Corner
• The Anatomy Corner

Open Courses

• Saylor Foundation

• All of their bio classes
• Bio 302 - Human Anatomy
• Human Anatomy Lab

Related articles

• The Impact of Open Textbooks at OpenStax College (creativecommons.org)
• Where Can I Download Pictures Of Human Anatomy Online | Human Anatomy Course (wdxnpl0d.wordpress.com)

OER: 12 Sources of Open Textbooks

(Photo credit: opensourceway)

With the State Department's announcement and posts on twitter about failed business models, I think this is a good time to revisit how to find actual free, openly licensed textbooks. There are many ways to find free, openly licensed textbooks on the internet. I have listed a dozen here, but if you are still not finding what you need, feel free to contact me. I really mean that. I think making education financially accessible to your students is just that important. Some of these resources over lap, but that is okay - you will find some of these sites easier to use than others. There are a lot of things happening in the world of open textbooks. A lot of the criticisms that you may have heard in the past are fading away as sites dedicated to the peer review and vetting of open textbooks become more prevalent. This is not the definitive list - if there is a site that you use or prefer, please post a comment and share.

1. Saylor Foundation
Each of the books listed below is freely available for download, online reading, and sharing, under one of various open licenses.

2. OpenStax
"OpenStax College is a nonprofit organization committed to improving student access to quality learning materials. Our free textbooks are developed and peer-reviewed by educators to ensure they are readable, accurate, and meet the scope and sequence requirements of your course."

3. MERLOT
"Putting educational innovations into practice. Find peer reviewed online teaching and learning materials. Share advice and expertise about education with expert colleagues. Be recognized for your contributions to quality education."

4. College Open Textbooks
If you run into any links to Flat World Knowledge textbooks here, be sure to go to the Saylor Foundation website to get free access to those titles. "College Open Textbooks has peer-reviewed more than 100 open textbooks for use in community college courses and identified more than 550: College Open Textbooks has already peer-reviewed several new open textbooks for use in community college courses and identified more than 250 others for consideration. Open textbooks are freely available for use without restriction and can be downloaded or printed from web sites and repositories."

5. Connexions
"Connexions is a dynamic digital educational ecosystem consisting of an educational content repository and a content management system optimized for the delivery of educational content. Connexions is one of the most popular open education sites in the world. Its more than 17,000 learning objects or modules in its repository and over 1000 collections (textbooks, journal articles, etc.) are used by over 2 million people per month."

6. Textbook Revolution
"Textbook Revolution is a student-run site dedicated to increasing the use of free educational materials by teachers and professors. We want to get these materials into classrooms. On this site you'll find links and reviews of textbooks and select educational resources. Some of the books are PDF files, others are viewable online as e-books, or some are simply web sites containing course or multimedia content."

7. Community College Consortium for Open Education Resources
"The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement encourages the creation and reuse of free, high-quality content and open source learning systems to replace expensive and proprietary systems. By promoting OER, community colleges can create sustainable academic resources for students and provide collaborative professional development opportunities for faculty."

8. Boundless Textbooks
"Boundless is pleased to offer open introductory textbooks in the following subjects. These textbooks are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license, which means anyone is welcome to quote, mashup, reuse, and republish any portion of any book, anywhere, so long as proper citation is given."

9. Wikibooks
Wikibooks is an "open-content textbooks collection that anyone can edit" with over 2,500 open-content textbooks.

10. Open Culture
A meta-collection of free textbooks.

11. Bookboon
"Online Textbooks for Free Bookboon's free online textbooks for students are focused and to the point. They are all written by highly respected professors from top universities in the world and cover topics such as economics, statistics, IT, engineering and natural science."

12. Directory of Open Access Books
"The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books. Academic publishers are invited to provide metadata of their Open Access books to DOAB. Metadata will be harvestable in order to maximize dissemination, visibility and impact. Aggregators can integrate the records in their commercial services and libraries can integrate the directory into their online catalogues, helping scholars and students to discover the books. The directory will be open to all publishers who publish academic, peer reviewed books in Open Access and should contain as many books as possible, provided that these publications are in Open Access and meet academic standards."

Related articles

• 8 Exemplary Open Textbooks and The Meaning Beyond Bringing Cost Down (classroom-aid.com)
• Tablets to Replace Textbooks in New York Public Schools? (the-digital-reader.com)
• OpenStax announces first iPad version of its free, online textbooks (insidehighered.com)
• Open Textbooks: Community and Sustainability (cain.blogspot.com)

Kaleidoscope Grant Research Findings

College of the Redwoods is a participant in the Kaleidoscope grant. This grant helped faculty partner with other colleges to develop free, openly licensed textbooks to help students save a significant amount of money. The Community College Consortium for Open Education Resources is sponsoring a webinar with a few of the participants to discuss the results of the grant. Their invitation is below:

(Photo credit: Dmitry Baranovskiy)

Please join us Tuesday, December 4, 10:00 am PST for a webinar on OER Research findings on student outcomes and faculty and student feedback. The Kaleidoscope project, a collaboration between six community colleges and two 4-year colleges, developed OER for eight General Education courses and will report on student learning outcomes and faculty satisfaction. Florida Virtual Campus has been administering surveys to both faculty and students using open textbooks and open educational resources at their college and university campuses through their Open Access Textbook project and will share their findings from the last three years. Another Next Generation Learning Grant funded project Bridge-2-Success has worked with non-traditional students transitioning back to college or entering for the first time to improve college success. Working with Open University UK adapted open educational resources (OER) and online data gathering, they will share student outcome data from Anne Arundel and their 20 pilot colleges.

Dr. Robin Donaldson, Director of Open Access Textbooks and Project Manager of Orange Grove, Florida Virtual Campus Robin will give us an overview of the student and faculty survey feedback from 2010 and 2011 and will compare how data has changed over time.

Dr. Nassim Ebrahimi, Ann Arundel Community College Nassim will report on student learning outcomes finding from the Bridge-2-Success project at Ann Arundel and the 20 pilot community colleges that participated.

Kim Thanos, Lumen Learning. Kim will share differences in how students performed in classrooms using OER compared to those who continued to use publisher materials. She will also report on satisfaction among faculty participants.

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Open Academics at the University of Minnesota

The Richardsonian Romanesque Pillsbury Hall (1889) is one of the oldest buildings on the University of Minnesota Minneapolis campus. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was really excited this morning to see Stacy Olson's tweet (@OlsonStacy) about the University of Minnesota's Open Textbook Catalog. This is more than a collection of links: their Open Academics site is easy to navigate and encourages faculty to post their reviews of textbooks. This is a great model for institutional support of open textbooks. In the words of the site: "If you are a faculty member from any institution, you can support this project and help your peers evaluate the textbooks in this catalog by writing a review of an open textbook in your field. Only experts like you can determine quality." This has been a perception issue with open education resources in the past - uneven quality. I want to encourage everyone to visit this site and contribute a review. These efforts should be supported because faculty should be vetting textbooks, not corporate education publishers. In a posting I made here earlier (OER: The Myth of Commercial Textbook Reliabilty), I wrote that "Instructors and academic departments should partner to author, revise, adapt, and vet course materials. We should be partnering with other institutions to support these efforts - a textbook should include a network of subject matter experts, expert practitioners in the field, and advanced students." Efforts like these encourage the formation of communities of scholarship around open textbooks. Commercial publishers do not work this way - it all has to be proprietary and in-house to justify the high costs of their "product." Communities of teaching and learning can do better. The University of Minnesota has taken a big step in that direction.

Related articles

• Making It Easier For Faculty To Find Quality Open Textbooks (keptup.typepad.com)
• New higher-ed open textbook catalog from UMinn (idea.org)
• Infographic: The Open Textbook Challenge (saylor.org)
• California universities to produce 50 open-source textbooks (teleread.com)

Open Content Licensing for Educators Workshop

Image via CrunchBase

This is from Cable Green: 

2012 is a significant year for open education and OER. We are celebrating 10 years since UNESCO coined the term "Open Educational Resources".

In joining the global celebrations, the OER Foundation will host a free online training workshop on OERs, Copyright and Creative Commons licensing.

When: 20 June -  3 July 2012 (to coincide with the UNESCO World OER Congress in Paris).

Where: Online

Cost: Free. Registrations for this celebratory online workshop are now open:  Register today to reserve your seat.

We are aiming to break our previous #OCL4Ed record of 1067 registrations, so please share the gift of knowledge and invite colleagues and friends to join us.

• Download a copy of the poster for the OCL4Ed Workshop (614KB) and display on local notice boards.
• Blog and share the registration link through your social networks: http://wikieducator.org/Open_content_licensing_for_educators/About

We welcome graduates of former OCL4Ed workshops to join our lead facilitators and assist with peer-learning support for educators around the world who want to learn more about OER and open licensing.  More info on how you can assist coming soon. 

We look forward to welcoming you to OCL4Ed 2012.06.

With kind regards

The OER Foundation team

COL Chair in OER at Otago Polytechnic

UNESCO-COL Chair in OER at Athabasca University

OER: Indigenous People's Reader

Jacqui Cain has edited a reader for developmental English classes that includes indigenous people's stories from around the world: stories translated from oral traditions. She did this presentation for the 2012 Online Teaching Conference which starts in June as part of their virtual presentations track.


The reader will be available at the end of the summer.

Open Textbooks: The College Student Speaks Out

Tuesday, April 5, 2011
2:00-3:00 PM EST / 11:00AM-Noon PST

Moderator: Nicole Allen
Textbook Advocate for the Student PIRGs and Director of the Make Textbooks Affordable campaign.

In the national debate surrounding textbook affordability and adoption, the student voice often goes unheard. Join Nicole Allen, the national Textbook Advocate for the Student Public Interest Research Groups (Student PIRGs), and college students from around the nation as they discuss their initiatives to make textbooks affordable through the use of high-quality open textbooks and other cost-saving solutions. Learn what motivates students to become and stay involved, and how they impact teaching and learning along the way. Don't miss this lively discussion!

Image via Wikipedia

Information and Free Registration

Open Education Resources - Free Math Textbooks

Image 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

Related articles

• Washington's 2-year colleges out to beat high cost of textbooks (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• What role does technology have in shaping a new future in education? (downes.ca)
• New MIT OpenCourseWare Initiative Aims to Improve Independent Online Learning (readwriteweb.com)
• OER: Pie in the sky or meaningful reality? (ictelt.blogspot.com)