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By Ana Tintocalis

California is one step closer to bringing free online textbooks for state college students, a huge step for the open education movement. A historic bill on the desk of Governor Jerry Brown would give college professors, and thereby students, an option to use free online, customizable curriculum rather than print textbooks, for which students spend upwards of $1,000 per year. The measure establishes the first free digital library for the University of California, the California State University and California Community College systems.

If the bill passes, students of 50 most popular lower-division courses could access the content through an online portal at little or no cost. Faculty members would be able to remix and repurpose the digital content as they see fit, rather than having to rely on print textbooks.

A similar effort is underway in the state of Washington, led by the Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges, which seeks to create an Open Course Library that will include inexpensive online educational content. [Read more about some of the challenges they're contending with.]

Dean Florez, president and CEO of the 20 Million Minds Foundation, who helped craft the bill for State Senate President Pro Tem Darryl Steinberg, says the content within the digital library would also be interactive, with links to chat rooms also known as “open study halls.”

“Our students are so used to being networked … we really see these books as ‘social books,’” Florez said. “Students become engaged with each other, not through the professor, but through the book itself.”

It would take $10 million in start-up costs to develop California’s first open source college library. The state would provide half of that amount; the other half has to be matched by foundations and other private sector players.

Textbook publishers have been reluctant to endorse the bill because the shift would substantially undercut their profits. The Association of American Publishers executive director Bruce Hildebrand says while textbook producers are not against open-source materials, they don’t like “when the government wants to go into competition to become publishers.”

But Florez says the state would not create these e-books. Instead, the state will be relying on content creators to collaborate with faculty, education tech developers in Silicon Valley and elsewhere to create innovative enhancements. The materials would then be placed under Creative Commons licensing, which allows students and educators to customize curriculum by choosing content from different resources.

Florez says faculty will have the final say in which e-books will be chosen because an amendment to the bill establishes the Open Resource Council comprised of UC, CSU and community college professors. These faculty members will be in charge of pinpointing which lower division courses should benefit from open source materials, what e-books get approved, and how often the content should be updated.

“[The measure] asks our faculty members to put their stamp of the approval on these books. These are the faculty members that will be using [the books]. I think that was a great improvement in the bill.”

The Governor has until the end of the month to sign or veto the legislation.

By Ben Stern, EdSurge

The enemy of innovation and growth is routine. These auspicious weeks before the school year commences are the perfect time to create a new routine that will ensure innovation in your instruction and growth as an instructor. Here are some idea for those who want to take advantage of these next few weeks to guarantee the best year they’ve ever had.

1. MOVE BEYOND THE TEXTBOOK

Textbooks are by nature restrictive. The chapter order is an imposition; the information within the book is only as current as the publication date. If you can, liberate yourself from the book! If you don’t have the luxury of foregoing textbooks altogether, you can still supplement them.

The first step is to choose a destination for the resources. If your school doesn’t already use a Learning Management System like Moodle or Blackboard, there are some excellent, free resources. Edmodo looks and feels a bit like Facebook but with education-friendly features like assignment postings, quizzes, due dates, and more. If you’d prefer more customizability and care less about the aesthetics of your destination you could build a wiki with your students on Wikispaces.

Once you set up your destination, you can begin to aggregate content and resources. Put a few resources up for the beginning of the year, but then invite students to contribute much of the material thereafter–an excellent strategy for enriching students’ learning. For instance, you might have students find interesting websites that relate to the themes of each chapter of the text. Students can then guide the class with their discoveries. You could have students rewrite sections of the textbook based on these resources and collect the best submissions in a wiki that becomes a sort of “living” textbook for your particular class. You can even invite students to discuss subject-related Youtube videos in an Edmodo discussion board, then pick up the discussion in class the next morning as a warm-up. Now is the best time to work out the kinks in these platforms (of which there are only a very few) and develop unit plans that make full use of them. You’ll thank yourself later (as will the students)!

2. BECOME AN EXPERT IN ONE TOOL

There are at least half a dozen apps and software for every job. Should you use Diigo, Delicious, eduClipper, Pinterest, or BagTheWeb to collect links? Is Photoshop, GIMP, Pixlr, or FotoFlexer the right photo-editing software? It’s overwhelming, and there really is no single right answer. (For the record, though, Diigo is great because of its iOS app and GIMP works well because it’s both free and powerful.) So pick one class of tools and become a ninja in how to use one of the leading tools in that class. Skills from one platform are transferable to the others. You will benefit from learning everything about whatever tool you choose.

3. READ ABOUT ALL THINGS EDUCATION

In the middle of the school year, a good novel sounds much more compelling than a book on education. But books on pedagogical theory can influence your instruction in meaningful and enduring ways even if they are short on immediate, practical advice. Reading books about math pedagogy have helped educators teach more linear, logical concepts like cause and effect analysis using timelines or even Roman battle strategies. Here are some favorite books from a summer reading list:

Scaling Up Success
Education Nation
The Students Are Watching
Reinventing Project-Based Learning

4. REVISIT YOUR HOMEWORK STRATEGY

Flipping is not just for math. The essential justification for flipping – that is, utilizing technology to redistribute tasks between homework and classwork to make both more meaningful – can benefit any class. Are there individual activities that you could turn into homework in order to devote more attention to students in class? Is there a tangential class discussion that you want to continue but can’t justify doing during precious class time?

To flip your lectures, you’ll need some kind of software. Camtasia is the crème de la crème of flipping software, but it’s expensive. An alternative is to film your lecture with your phone, edit it with Windows Live Movie Maker or iMovie, and post it to Youtube as an unlisted video, and use the discussion board to allow your students to ask and answer questions.

But you don’t necessarily need to post a lecture on-line to flip your class. Any aspect of your class can be flipped. An English teacher asked her students to conduct discussions of each reading assignment on her Edmodo page. Some students were responsible for posting a discussion question, others for being first responders, and others for posting follow-ups. Then, every student had to respond to another discussion thread also. The roles rotated and were staggered over a few days so that timing issues were minimized. We found that the students retained the reading better when they had to engage with their classmates immediately. In class, they would apply their understanding of the reading in some creative endeavor like a skit and discuss the essential meaning of the text at the very end of class. The extra time afforded to the students by the meaningful work they did the night before allowed them to access the core of the text much more effectively.

5. MAKE A PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT SCHEDULE

A formal principal used to tell the kids: “Ask for it and you just might get it!” The same sentiment applies to teachers. Funds are limited in every school and they become increasingly scarce as the school year progresses. Get your requests in now. Look for major conferences in your nearest city and peruse the blogs, Twitter, and EdSurge for other educators’ assessments of previous year’s events. To demonstrate your genuine commitment to regular PD, also “attend” some free webinars such as these from ASCD or these from EdWeek. Watch TED talks about education and peruse Teaching Channel for lesson plan inspiration. Your administrators will be more inclined to encourage your continued learning, and you will get that much-needed “shot in the arm” on a regular basis.

Your teaching is only as good as your learning. During the madness of a school year, it’s very difficult to begin any new endeavor that doesn’t relate directly to your class. So use these final dog days of summer to set yourself up to be a learner for the rest of the year.

This piece was reprinted from EdSurge-Instruct, a weekly newsletter for educators on education technology products and great practices.

Ben Stern writes the “Because You Asked” column for EdSurge. He is also the Technology Integrationist for a middle school in New York City. Earlier in his career, he revamped his curriculum using computers and the Internet, replacing textbooks with scholarly sources and leveraging the connectivity afforded by the Internet to contextualize content. Since then, Ben has found a passion in the evolution of education through technology and works to help teachers enhance their curriculum wherever possible. You can follow him on Twitter at @EdTechBSt

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By Frank Catalano

Schools are moving from creamy to chunky — but not in relation to cafeteria peanut butter. The change in texture is happening with content.

Instruction that was structured linearly, captured in books that were all-inclusive monoliths with a predetermined progression for a uniform, somewhat “creamy” consistency, is shifting to newer forms of instructional content that are more “chunky,” beginning as a scattered landscape of digital pieces that are then assembled to support full courses

The trend, steady and apparently inexorable, is inspired by higher education, driven by financial pressures, propelled by foundations and the federal government, and enabled by technology.

Digital course materials are, of course, nothing new. One of the highest-profile such initiatives, MIT’s OpenCourseWare, is a decade old. And digital textbooks, which have morphed from crude PDF representations of paper books to interactive iBooks, have also been available for years.

Now, digital curriculum — in both college and K-12 — seems to be shifting from attempts to break apart comprehensive digital textbooks to meet classroom needs, to building up lessons and courseware from individual instructional chunks. And that has the potential to make the traditional definition of “textbook” somewhat quaint.

Encouraging this acceleration of digital chunky content, in large part, is the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement.

OER, though definitions vary, is at its heart digital instructional content that’s designed to be mixed, modified and shared. In other words, a teacher can pick and choose learning elements he or she needs for a lesson from a variety of sources, make changes, use those lessons in class, and theoretically then distribute either the individual pieces or the completed combination to other educators for their use.

It’s like creating your own music playlist by choosing tracks from various artists and sequencing them any way you want.

Overall, four core factors have come together to fuel the rise of digital content, including OER pieces, across the educational landscape, from kindergarten to college:

PRICE. Ask any educator the appeal of OER you’ll likely to hear, “It’s free content.” While that may not always be true (there is OER available to institutions by subscription through the delightfully named HippoCampus, for example), and not all digital content is OER (just ask any education industry company), perceptions do matter. And the perception that a lot of quality content is available for only the cost of labor has led a lot of school districts and teachers to try it during difficult budget times.

AVAILABILITY. Spurred by entrepreneurs and fueled by funding from, among others, the Gates and Hewlett Foundations (as well as the continued efforts of long-time educational publishers and ed-tech companies), there’s simply a lot more digital content on the web than there used to be, for example Khan Academy videos and materials from NASA. But significantly more has been developed by existing educational powerhouses, start-ups and educators themselves. Anything digital, and granular enough, works.

DISCOVERABILITY. A big challenge has simply been finding what online materials exist on the web beyond known repositories such as Curriki. Two very prominent, and public, initiatives are tackling this.

Last November, the U.S. Departments of Education and Defense launched the beta of the Learning Registry, which is basically a directory of kindergarten-through-adult digital education resources from a wide variety of government, state, district and private sources. What makes the Registry unique is that any provider can register content (the National Archives, Smithsonian and PBS were among the early participants), and any educator can quickly find lessons plans and content specific to his or her unique needs based on subject, grade level or other criteria. And the Learning Registry doesn’t just reside at one address on the web; it’s more of a embeddable, distributed index that can be browsed from many websites.

A second, related effort is the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative. Steered by the Association of Educational Publishers and Creative Commons, LRMI is a fast-tracked project, launched just last June, to make it easier to find educational resources via major search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. At its core, this is about consistently tagging digital educational content – no matter who creates it – with metadata that search engines understand.

Taken together, the hope is that LRMI and the Learning Registry will go a long way toward solving the problem of highlighting appropriate educational chunks.

FLEXIBILITY. A large part of the appeal of digital chunked content is its flexibility. Pluto’s planetary status in flux? Swap out chunks without wiping out the lesson or course (but keep the old one, just in case the astronomical protests are successful). And flexibility goes beyond delivery via pixel.

Utah, for example, has the Utah Open Textbook high school science curriculum. Created from OER content, the course textbooks are then printed and distributed. But the cost is $5.35 per book, versus about $80 for a traditional science textbook, prompting the project’s David Wiley to note at this year’s SXSWedu conference that these become books kids mark up and keep, rather than having to turn in at the end of the year.

In higher education, AcademicPub allows digital textbooks to be created with a mix of copyrighted (paid) and open (free) content. The automated process leads to a custom electronic or paper book – essentially, a digital course pack. And there are several other examples.

But the increased use of chunked digital content, especially OER, is not without pitfalls. The overused phrase, “free like a puppy, not free like a beer,” applies to any effort that replaces publisher cost with teacher labor to find, assemble and maintain content (even if, once assembled ,content is shared). And if the materials aren’t printed, every student has to have access to a hardware device that properly displays the content.

Yet flexible, “free,” and findable may trump the downsides as digital curriculum adds more do-it-yourself options  alongside its pre-built counterparts – as long as no student or teacher trips over the chunks.

Frank Catalano is a consultant, author and veteran analyst of digital education and consumer technologies. He tweets @FrankCatalano, consults as Intrinsic Strategy, and writes the regular Practical Nerd column for GeekWire.

As the current generation of college graduates wrangles with an unprecedented amount of debt, a sea change is underway in higher education. More and more elite universities are offering free online courses that might characterize the next iteration of the college experience for the forthcoming generation of students.

Will students be able to receive the equivalent of a bachelors degree for free? How will brick-and-mortar institutions be used in the future? Will academic rigor suffer? How will credentials or tuition apply to those who come to campus and those who complete courses online?

At the moment, students of these online courses receive certificates of completion, but no university credit. But the movement is still in major flux as we speak, as day by day, yet another development in free online education is announced. What started 11 years ago with MIT’s OpenCourseWare — the syllabi, lecture notes, problem sets and solutions, exams, reading lists, and event video lectures from more than 2,000 MIT courses — has amassed into an explosive movement that’s compelling venerable institutions to reconfigure their education platform to an online audience.

Last fall, a group of Stanford professors decided to offer a few courses online free of charge and were overwhelmed when hundreds of thousands of students signed up for their courses. That experiment has spawned the growth of similar endeavors. Here’s a guide to some of the newest free education sites and what they offer, with the big caveat that this will soon change, as more institutions come aboard.

• COURSERA. Coursera is an interactive online learning system that offers free courses from Princeton, Stanford, University of California, Berkeley, University of Michigan—Ann Arbor and University of Pennsylvania. Their courses span the range from humanities, to social science, computer science, business, biology, medicine and mathematics. Andrew Ng, one of the Stanford professors whose class drew an astounding 100,000 students, and his new business partner, Daphne Koller, announced that they received $16 million in investment capitol from two prominent Silicon Valley firms to launch the project. Students will have access to lectures, interactive elements like quiz questions interspersed throughout lectures to help students recall and retain information, and peer-grading for homework, essays and tests. They plan to use crowd-sourcing algorithms to help ensure accuracy in peer grading, a move that will also  help professors manage such large-scale classes. What’s more, Coursera’s partner institutions will use the online learning platform to enhance in-class teaching. Based on a Department of Education study that shows online learning can be as effective as classroom learning, the participating universities will offer a mixture of interactive and static learning to explore the best way for students to retain the information. CERTIFICATION: As with the popular Stanford courses, students will not get academic credit from the participating institutions, but will receive a certificate of completion from the professor.

• MITx –> edX. MIT took its OpenCourseWare platform to the next level with MITx, which offers full professor-taught courses online (not just class materials), but after just one course this spring (Circuits and Electronics), MITx entered an agreement with Harvard, and is now part of edX. The two universities will use the MITx platform to bring in a wider array of classes to the site. What’s key here is the software for the platform is open-source, so other universities can use it too. The more universities add content, the more compelling a choice edX becomes amidst the growing number of offerings. Both schools have invested heavily in the project — each gave $30 million to a non-profit organization that they will co-manage. Edx will feature video lectures, embedded quizzes, interactive learning, online labs, and a lot of peer interaction. CERTIFICATION: Certificates of mastery will be given to students who demonstrate knowledge of course material.

• UDACITY. Sebastian Thrun, one of the professors who offered the first set of free online Stanford classes last year, which drew 160,000 registrants (22,000 finished the class), left a tenured position at the university to start Udacity, which focuses on computer science. Thrun taught an online artificial intelligence course for free at Stanford last fall with Dr. Peter Norvig, another artificial intelligence expert. Their course drew 160,000 students, with 22,000 students finishing the class. That inspired Thrun to start Udacity, which pulls in outside experts like Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman, to teach courses. They do not operate under the auspices of a university, although some of their guest-lecturers do teach at other universities. Their course offerings are aimed at practical computer science skills, like how to build an app or search engine. CERTIFICATION: Students receive a certificate of completion at the end of the course signed by the instructor.

• UDEMY. Staying away from high-profile academic names, this site tagline is “the university of you.” Courses can be taught by anyone, and most are free, though some cost a small fee ranging between $5-$250. Whether or how much to charge is up to the instructor. The course offerings on Udemy are broad; they’ve got non-traditional courses like “Tournament Poker Theory” (cost $39) or “Yoga For Weight Loss” (cost $39), in addition to traditional academic subjects like computer science, business, and marketing. The site encourages anyone to become an instructor and build name or brand recognition.
• P2PU. Similar to Udemy, Peer-2-Peer University uses the open education model to allow users to learn from others on the web or design and teach courses. Course offerings are broad, but there is some attempt to categorize by offering “schools” of web development, mathematics, social innovation, and education. The courses are totally free and P2PU gives out badges in recognition of completion. Again, the model requires a significant amount of participation and collaboration from students, including grading each others’ assignments.
• MINERVA PROJECT. Billing it as the “first elite American University to be launched in a century,” Minerva CEO Ben Nelson, who was formerly CEO of Snapfish, intends to launch a full-fledged, “Ivy League-quality” online university by 2014. Rather than offering separate courses, the university will offer a complete college education with an accompanying degree. The cost is yet undetermined, though Nelson has said it will cost significantly less than most college degrees cost today. The Minerva Project has drawn attention from investors and is trying to draw the best professors possible by giving out Minerva Prizes to the best college-level teachers that come with a cash reward.

Flickr: Incase

By Nathan Maton

Back in 2001, MIT launched OpenCourseWare, a bold idea to put world-class MIT professors’ lectures, syllabi and resources online to the world for free. Today, Open Education Resources (OER) industry leaders are arguing that the free content is only the starting point.

The next stage of the open education movement has evolved into Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) — the key word being “massive,” as in drawing tens or hundreds of thousands of students. Last fall, Sebastian Thrun’s Artificial Intelligence course enrolled 160,000 students and Thrun recently gave up tenure at Stanford to start Udacity, a company that will offer more MOOCs.

But at such a huge scale, what are the digital methods of teaching that work best? Philipp Schmidt, founder of the free online university P2PU, preaches three building blocks: community, recognition and content.

“It was totally clear to me [several years ago] that content is only the starting point,” Schmidt said at recently at a SXSW session. “The really exciting stuff is going to be the learning, the assessments and the stuff that you need the content for. In a way, we started P2PU because institutions weren’t doing it. How do we build community around it and recognition for this open content is my question.”

The Stanford professors readily admit that some of the students who participated in their online courses provided their peers with deeper, more comprehensive answers than they were able to.

You’d expect MIT to tout its content as the solution. But that’s not how Steve Carson, director of external affairs for OpenCourseWare, describes the benefits of their project.

“The most exciting thing is that the last six months of open education have been spectacularly disruptive,” Carson says. “It was kind of a sleepy enterprise for the last 10 years where MIT was doing its thing and there were other projects doing their thing. It was all good and there were positive global benefits, but in the past 10 years I’ve heard people say campus-based education better look out, that this will be threatening to their business model, and I’ve never really felt that until the last six months. The pace of change in open education is qualitatively different than it was even a few months ago.”

Carson argues that MIT’s work is merely a necessary transitory experiment. It only puts classes and course material online, but you still have to watch, frequently from the back of the room, as the professor lectures students. He compares it to Wikipedia. MIT’s videos and materials provide deep references on a subject — but not the actual courses themselves.

Carson is a big fan of Schmidt’s work.  At P2PU, they run online courses that can be taught by a peer (you can create your own course), and they heavily promote the social part of learning. They have a peer mentor program to help students get through their courses and have the most users teaching web development courses, although Schmidt says they’ll be doing less of that. Schmidt believes that even with all the OER in the world, the way people learn is by being excited about it, by making things (even if it is just a blog post) and working together.

“The things I care most about is collaborative skills, are you a good communicator, can you get stuff done?” Schmidt says. “I think that’s the number one thing that isn’t being assessed anywhere that is super important. That’s what you ask when someone wants a job from you: do they get stuff done.”

Carson likes Schmidt’s focus on community, recognition and content because he argues it is more important to discover successful learning techniques rather than merely sign up 100,000 students online. He sees promoting big-sized classes as a way to bring attention to the issue.

“I think one of the higher level struggles these MOOCs are injecting themselves into is to change the way higher education as it is practiced on campus,” Carson said. “It is an opportunity to show faculty members different ways the Internet can support learning.”

And what exactly is the problem all these groups are trying to solve? It’s the sudden acceleration of global higher education demand.

“If you look at the scope and scale of the educational need in the world we’re going to need all of our educational systems firing on all cylinders to come close to even meeting the educational demand emerging in the world,” Carson said. “You could offer a thousand courses enrolling a 100,000 students each and you would not even be scratching the surface of the need in India and China and other developing regions. So we need these educational techniques to solve this problem.”

It took 11 years to get from the launch of OpenCourseWare to the point where a Stanford professor would walk away from a tenure position to launch another online learning venture. So how long will it take to build this next phase? For computer science, experiments like Thrun’s suggest that it may not take that long. Other types of courses Schmidt describes as important don’t yet exist.  And P2PU is still a relatively small community of around 30,000 members. Other countries have small experiments building OER and digital courses using high tech solutions like 3-D simulations, but no strong business model to scale their open efforts.

“We probably haven’t fully made the transition to digitally native pedagogies and learning approaches,” Carson said. “The first generation of distance learning is basically an attempt to move the classroom online, and I think that part of the scalable learning of these massive courses is the breakdown of that model.”

Flickr:FontFont

Open education sites exemplify how technology is democratizing education. These sites allow both learners and teachers to create their own curriculum, whether it’s used in or out of the classroom.

Here’s a comprehensive list of open education sites MindShift has covered. As always, we love to hear about sites that aren’t included in the list, so add them to the comments!

• MIT Open CourseWare: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology publishes nearly all of its course content on this site, from videos to lecture notes to exams, all free of charge and open to the public. Many other universities are doing the same, often using the content management system EduCommons. Read about how this seminal project changed the education landscape.
• Wikis (a.k.a. collaborative Web pages) and nonprofits devoted to enabling open-source curricula are springing up everywhere. One of the most well-known, Curriki, encourages teachers to both publish and download materials — anything from a vocabulary quiz to a full biology textbook — and vets its content through member ratings and incentives such as the annual Summer of Content Awards, which offers grants for specific contributions.

• Open Educational Resources (OER) Commons: Created by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), OER is a rich and comprehensive landing site for open source education software, from peer-reviewed e-textbooks to lesson plans, video lectures to worksheets. Almost everything is Creative Commons licensed and open for modification and adaptation. You can follow their blog or find them on Twitter, and the OER Commons Initiative is also hard at work developing training programs and collaborative projects with teachers, students, and schools.
• Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources: A branch of the OER movement with the goal of growing and improving open textbooks for use in community colleges. Established in 2007 by the Foothill-De Anza Community College District, this is a community-college destination page for networking with colleagues and using and editing instructional materials in everything from anthropology to physics. Similarly, the Community College Open Textbook Collaborative catalogs textbooks by subject alongside reviews of those textbooks. Colleges, governmental agencies, and other education organizations belong to this group, which also provides training for instructors aiming to adopt and adapt open resources.
• Flat World Knowledge: One of the leading organizations in the open textbook movement, this for-profit company provides online versions of their Creative Commons-licensed material to anyone free of charge (with the ability to customize and modify it), but sells print and downloadable versions of their books to keep business afloat. Also available: Audio books, study guides, and Webinars.
• HippoCampus: A project of the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education, this affectionately-termed resource page is a one-stop shop for high school and college students looking for study and homework help, and for instructors interested in supplementing their course materials. The site includes multimedia lessons, complete courses, and study aids on a variety of topics.
• Open Textbook Catalog: College students, professors, and the rest of the globe can access this collection of customizable, printable online textbooks. There’s still a disclaimer in place, though, since this site is organized by a student group that doesn’t have the resources or expertise to review and rate every listing extensively. Their Open Textbook Resources page is a great spot for information and links to additional organizations, however.

• P2PU: The Peer 2 Peer University is a grassroots open education project in which anyone can participate. Volunteers facilitate the courses, but the learners are in charge. P2PU leverages both open content and the open social web, with a model for lifelong learning.
• OpenStudy: OpenStudy is a social learning network where independent learners and traditional students can come together in a massively-multiplayer study group. Through OpenStudy, learners can find other working in similar content areas in order to support each other and answer each others’ questions. OpenStudy supports a number of study groups, including those focused on several MIT OCW courses.
• NITXY: NIXTY is building a learning management platform that supports open education resources. Rather than an LMS that closes off both academic resources and academic progress, NIXTY is designed to support open courses so that schools, teachers, and students’ work is not necessarily closed off from the rest of the Web.
• OER Glue: Still under development, OER Glue will be a site to watch. The Utah-based startup is building a browser-based tool that will allow students and teachers to “glue” together OER resources online. Rather than having to copy-and-paste resources into a new setting, OER Glue will reuse and integrate resources.
• iUniv: iUniv is a Japanese startup that is building web and mobile apps to support and make social video and audio OCW content. Resources can be shared to Twitter, Facebook, and Evernote so that students can actively engage in discussions around OCW content.
• OCWSearch: OCW Search is a search engine dedicated, as the name suggests, to helping learners find OCW content. The project is, unfortunately, no longer under development, but it does index ten universities’ OCW content, including MIT, Notre Dame, and The Open University UK.
• Smarthistory: Smarthistory is a free and open multimedia website that demonstrates how very heavy, pricey, and obsolete the traditional art history textbook is.
• CK-12: The CK-12 Foundation’s Flexbook platform provides free, collaboratively-built and openly-licensed digital textbooks for K-12. Much of the content is standards based.
• Flat World Knowledge: [UPDATED] The company offers digital content for college students published under an open license. This allows professors to customize the books they order – edit, add to, mix-up – or use as-is. Students can access the books online for free or can pay $29.95 for unlimited digital access to their textbook in different formats: e-books, audiobooks, downloadable PDFs and interactive study aids. The material is free of digital rights management (DRM) restrictions and never expires.
• Connexions: Connexions is a repository of educational content, containing over 17,000 openly licensed learning modules. Teachers, students, and professionals can search and contribute scholarly content, organized into “modules” or topic areas instead of entire textbooks.
• CK12 FlexBooks: A nonprofit that aims to reduce the cost of textbook materials by encouraging the development of what they call the “FlexBook.” Anyone can view or help create these standards-based, customizable, collaborative texts.
• Shmoop: An up-and-coming collection of freely shared, expert-written content (most Shmoop authors are Ph.D.s and high school or college-level educators) with the goal of inspiring students and providing tons of free resources to teachers that include writing guides, analyses, and discussions.
• Princeton University: The university’s faculty is posting its lectures online for free.