Free Curricula Center

Steve,

Best wishes for your project's success. Many's the time I've wished for such a site. Your website is informative and ambitious. May it grow and prosper!

As you point out, most available material is ancillary, but I have stumbled across some terrific full-blown courses on the web, some interactive ones far superior to printed materials. I can't help wondering if compiling a structured list of recommended on-line PD textbooks might be a boon both to authors and students. For example, a "textbook" on your site could consist of a link to an existing one that had been reviewed and endorsed, or a set of links to modules that would amount to a complete course.

You're looking for participants, of course, not presumptuous advice, and to be useful such a list would take a lot of work to compile and maintain. And it may be that it exists already somewhere.

(The lists I've seen are shotgun approaches either dedicated to a single subject or to everything-all-at-once. I haven't seen anything organized like a college catalog, by department and course level.)

But if such a site exists, that might be a good place to start, to ensure that the texts your group composes are the ones that are not already available--if one only knew where to look.

Just a thought. It seems you're well along in your planning and I don't mean to suggest any detours.

Bill

 

1. Here is the text for an online course in computer programming from Rice University, using Scheme, a radically abbreviated version of Lisp, a recursion-oriented computer language.

http://www.htdp.org/

The complete, free Scheme package is available here

http://www.plt-scheme.org/

along with other applications.

What is interesting about the course is that although it is an introductory course for majors, it presents computer science as a liberal art.
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2. If you went to the Lancaster University Center for Applied Statistics short course page

http://www.cas.lancs.ac.uk/short_courses/coursematerials.html

and downloaded the short courses on Introduction to Mathematics for Social Scientists, Statistical Methods, Statistical Inference, you'd have a concise but rigorous course in statistics for free. It wouldn't be a course for someone who wants to know whether the CLEP or DANTES stat test is easier--the math intro includes summation notation, but eventually gets into calculus-- but if you added a couple of the short courses in Methodology and and the software course on the free statistical computer package, R, you'd have a solid basis for statistical study, better, I dare say, than the average social science major at my school.

Well, this has drifted rather far from the notion of a course textbook, but it's modularized already, and provides variety of content and approaches.

You mentioned public domain texts, and I've always thought that a comprehensive free English Literature Survey course--say a prep for the Lit GRE for COSC or Excelsior students--could be developed from the Project Gutenberg texts and introductory chapters for each selection (or, again, judicious links to websites dedicated to the selected works and authors.)

It's a lot of fun to think about, and the more you do, the more the possibilities grow. Good luck!

Bill

 

Steve,

Congratulations on your new endeavor! Good luck to you and your partners. It sounds exciting.

Breaking the backs of the for-profit publishers is not a new idea, of course... but it's sure a good one! For example, the Public Library of Science (PLOS) is thinking pretty much along the same lines as you guys are... only in PLOS's case, it's with respect to medical and scientific journals, rather than texts. In fact, now that I think about it, you could probably find some good authors among those who have been published in PLOS journals. After all, they've obviously already bought-in to the open source paradigm; so they'll probably embrace what you're doing, too. Check it out.

Let me know if you can think of any way I can help.

Again, good luck!

 

Your notion of a worthy goal?

 

Last year, all Intro to Stats students at my school were required to buy the 8th edition of John Freund's Introductory Statistics at about $120 a pop. (You'd think he'd've gotten it right by the 6th or 7th try.)

Now a new edition of a statistics textbook rarely constitutes a substantial re-write of the previous one and even more rarely a substantive improvement.

The main reason I can see for 8 editions of this text is to prevent students from recycling used texts ad infinitum. There just haven't been that many innovations in introductory statistics recently. (The Freund text, incidentally, is the least innovative one that I know of.)

I've co-authored a textbook myself, and I appreciate it when a bit of change comes in from the royalty, so my belief in the value of intellectual property is undoubtedly sincere.

For the large part, however, these introductory texts all cover the same core material, all of which is common knowledge among statisticians. And most of them cover the material in exactly the same order and in roughly the same fashion. In fact, the bulk of the actual intellectual property consists of the problems and test questions composed by graduate students.

In another instance, my department this year decided to switch textbooks for its two-course business statistics sequence, just, basically, for the hell of it. There's nothing wrong with the text we've been using; in fact it gives more complete coverage of our department's required topics than the new one. But once again students will be unable to buy or sell used versions of the old text.

If these students were not a captive market, they'd have access to the required material at, say, a 25th of the cost, since you can pick up an old but perfectly good stats book at a non-campus used book store for a few bucks.

The capper is that many instructors use these texts just as a source for problems, basing their tests on their lectures, sometimes not even reading the texts themselves. So there is little reason for their students to buy any particular text.

So, yeah, if there is public domain access to knowledge, I'm all for spreading it around. Any decrease in textbook publishers' profits is just lagniappe.

 

The captors being the publishers or the schools?

Yet the schools stipulate use of the latest texts. Odd thing, no?

 

Why, yes, as a matter of fact... it is. Thank you, so much, for asking.

Breaking their backs is not the same as killing them.

Sometimes a smackdown is called for and appropriate.

 

Well, actually, it gets even more interesting than that. You may not need to even get the authors' permission (or PLOS's) to use PLOS-published stuff. I mean, that's the whole point of the open content movement, right? PLOS's copyright notice makes it very clear that as long as there's attribution, and that certain other easy-to-comply-with criteria are met, pretty much anyone can use pretty much anything it has published in pretty much any way they wish. Thoretically, you could publish a text that's little more than a compendium of PLOS-published articles... without asking for or receiving anyone's okeedokee to do so!

Open source, by definition, has virtually unlimited possibilities... including ways to make money despite the seemingly limiting commercial constraints inherent in the basic construct. If you don't believe that, just ask the folks at the highly-profitable, yet open-source RedHat!

 

more free stuff

I'm sorry, Steve, I didn't read carefully enough. I thought what you had in mind was textbooks for self-study rather than for teachers' choosing.

Anyhow, here is a wonderful site for a Middle English course:

http://hosting.uaa.alaska.edu/afdtk/ect_main.htm

It's called "The Electronic Canterbury Tales," but it has much, much more--links to works of Chaucer's sources, contemporaries, heirs, Norse sagas--all in good if not contemporary editions--manuscript facsimiles, modern translations, lectures etc.

And here's another Stats page--a complete course with interactive links:

http://faculty.vassar.edu/lowry/webtext.html

Bill

 

decimon,
Well, it was the publisher that put out the 8th edition of the stats intro textbook and stopped the 7th, so the school couldn't use it. On the other hand, it was the school that decided to abandon a perfectly good business stats textbook and choose a new one.

Sometimes it's necessary: my algorithms class had to use a textbook whose code would not always compile due to incompatabilities with the current C++ conventions. This strikes me as a dereliction.

Sometimes it's not done. In most of my lit courses, the teachers couldn't care less which edition we used, so long as the version of the work was the same as everyone else's.

Bill

 

That, I think, is the real problem. They're not doing it to make some guy on Park Avenue richer so why do they do it?

If the change is necessary then it is. But as far as I know there have been few changes in any algebra we are apt to encounter.

And, if I have it right, schools like Touro dispense with textbooks in favor of roll-their-own study material.

 

DamfIno. Because they can?
"Ho-hum. I'm getting bored with this Black text."
"Well, let's try another."
"OK."

That was roughly the explanation I got.

Bill

 

No big surprise here. Which is why I just buy from amazon.com and bookfinder.com.

 

PLOS, for what it's worth, uses Creative Commons copyright language.

As for PLOS content's suitability to your project because of its advanced nature versus your undergraduate focus, that's a good point. It may well not be. I'm sure you'll figure that out, though.

As for contacting authors rather than just using their work even if the Creative Commons license permits it, yes... that would be the more honorable (and probably more opportunity-laden) approach. I'm just saying that if open content is really what PLOS says it is, you could do it without anyone permission.

And the only reason I brought-up open source is because that's a near paradigm. I realize that it's not exact. Until open content becomes as well known, open source is a good place from which to derive examples.

It's a terribly exciting thing you're doing, in any case. Whether or not PLOS ends-up being a suitable source is a relative small and inconsequential thing in the larger scheme of things. My comments were just more in the spirit of open content, generally.

I reiterate my congratulations and good luck wish! I look forward to seeing what you guys develop this into. It will be terribly interesting, I think. Terribly interesting. Please keep us advised.