DailyDirt: Open Textbooks Starting To Save Students Real Money

One aspect of the open educational resources movement (OER) is open textbooks that are free to use -- content in the public domain or with copyright terms that require only attribution (or attribution and share-alike clauses). Open textbooks have taken some time to get written, reviewed and adopted -- but now that there are hundreds of these books available, students should be able to use them freely and benefit from (and even contribute to) these educational materials.

• One estimate reports that college students can save about $128 per course by using open textbooks. That's just a few hundred bucks that pales in comparison to tuition these days, but it could be a significant dent in the publishing industry if every class used open textbooks. [url]
• OpenStax college books claims to have saved students $39 million in the 2015-16 academic year. OpenStax says that 1 in 5 US colleges are using its textbooks. Launched in 2012, OpenStax is on target for its goal of publishing textbooks for the 25 most-attended college courses and saving students $500 million by 2020. [url]
• Several states have endorsed open textbook projects. Besides OpenStax, Minnesota has an open textbook library, and California is trying to cut its $400 million costs on K-12 textbooks (someday). [url]

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