Open Education Resources at College of the Redwoods

I sent this invitation out to our faculty:

Are you concerned about the high cost of education for your students?

Have you ever wished that there was something that you could do to bring down that cost?

One of the ways you can do that is to consider choosing an “open” textbook for your class. Open textbooks are free electronically or available to students for the printing cost. These textbooks have been written by instructors but have been released to other educators through public domain, Creative Commons, or other means of flexible copyright. In this presentation, we will look at collections of open source textbooks that have been created by instructors and subject matter experts and made available to schools right here in California and across the country. We will learn about organizations who vet these books for the state of California. We will look at new business models that provide free and low-cost textbooks to students and still manage to compensate instructors for their work.

I was delighted to find that two of our faculty, Dave Arnold and Bruce Wagner, are way ahead of the curve here and have written two Math textbooks (with contributions from other instructors).

Intermediate Algebra & Pre-Algebra

From what I understand, this was an individual as well as a dept. effort. I plan on interviewing them and putting that up here in the near future.

We have another faculty member interested in a music theory textbook and a couple who are interested in psychology. This is going to be a good year for the students!