In order to prepare several questions to ask next Thursday class’s guest speaker, David Wiley, an expert on Open Source, I browsed his blog yesterday afternoon, finding out two interesting articles he posted: The Current State of Open Educational Resource and The one that got away: Open Textbooks.

Open Textbooks describes the situation about the raising price of textbooks in U.S. and makes suggestions about how to make open textbooks available in several way. He also mentioned “While efforts like the OpenCourseWares are making great strides in providing curriculum materials in an open way, the development of open textbooks that could be voluntarily adopted by university faculty has been very slow to occur.” Selling textbooks could be a very lucrative business for both publishers and university faculties. If textbooks are available for students for free of charge, they will not be happy. I really want to know the reaction of university faculties about open textbooks.

In the second article, The Current State of Open Educational Resource, I found a link about China Open Source for Education. It has a lot of rich contents from varieties of disciplines, syllabus, ppts, and assignments to video of class, contacting experts and professors. It’s really very handy for students and teachers to access those courses; however, I don’t know if there is a standard to judge those contents and who can decide how much contents can be posted in the open courses.

(The one that got away: Open Textbook has been posted to Article Achives)


IDTyao
18:05:29