The CSU Initiative
The CSU’s Affordable Learning Solutions Campaign is designed to enable faculty to choose and provide quality educational content that is more affordable for their students.
The Affordable Learning Solutions website is designed to:
- Make it easy for faculty, staff, and students to find no/low cost course content that can substitute for more costly textbooks
- Enable faculty to be recognized for their efforts in reducing costs for students
- Share practices for using no/low cost digital content in CSU courses
- Support campuses in customizing their strategies to enable affordable learning solutions
Check out the CSU-AFS website.
CSU Rent Digital
Students can save 60 percent or more when they rent digital textbooks, or e-textbooks. Faculty can choose e-textbooks for their courses from thousands of popular titles available from major publishers. When students buy the book at significant savings, they succeed. Learn more on the Lower Cost Publishers' Materials page.
Why use a textbook?
Check out this presentation on reasons to use a traditional textbook ... and other alternatives available!
Traditional Textbooks
Publishers' digital textbooks typically cost 45-55% less than the retail price for new print textbooks.
The CI Bookstore offers new and used textbooks and some e-Textbook rentals through:
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- Cafe Scribe (rent e-Textbook or keep forever)
- Rent-A-Text (eFollett.com)
- CourseSmart (representing 90% of the core textbooks in use today)
- Cengage Brain (e-Chapters at $4-10 per chapter)
Open/Low-Cost Textbooks
FlatWorld Knowledge - a growing publisher of low-cost textbooks in multiple disciplines.
College Open Textbooks - list of open textbooks by discipline
Global Text Project - Search open textbooks by discipline, currently strongest in business and the sciences.
Orange Grove - Florida's digital repository. Link goes to Browse Higher Education Resources.
Federal Resources for Educational Excellence - Teaching and learning resources from Federal agencies.
DOAB-Directory of Open Access Books - Academic peer-reviewed books from 23 publishers
Bookboon - no registration required, authors are mostly UK college professors
Open Education Resources-Information
This excellent informational guide created by UMass Amherst is worth digging around in for a fuller explanation of what OER (Open Education Resources) are and how they can be used.
How to Search for OER
NBC Learn
Amazing collection of short videos covering all academic disciplines to enhance student learning -- embedded in BlackBoard (CILearn) for VERY easy implementation!!!
Blackboard Content Partners - Info and Training
Content Partner NBC Archives
Content Partner McGraw-Hill
- Pair Your Blackboard Course with Your McGraw-Hill Connect Section Watch It!
- Prepare Your Students for McGraw-Hill Connect and Blackboard Watch It!
- Add Your McGraw-Hill Connect Assignments within Blackboard Watch It!
- Deploy Your McGraw-Hill Connect Assignments to Blackboard Watch It!
- McGraw-Hill Faculty Training Tutorial 17 minutes recorded Collaborate session Watch It!
Affordable Learning at Channel Islands
The main benefit of new technologies in education should be to provide more choice to instructors, and ultimately to students. If a professor can mix open content with chapters from relevant textbooks, timely journal articles, and up-to-the-minute news reporting, then he or she can truly provide a unique “book” to students, untethered from the rigidity of the traditional offerings from academic publishers.
What do you want to do?
Search for publishers offering eTextbook rental
Search for FREE textbooks -- search by ISBN or topic
Search for FREE course materials and learning objects
Search for eBooks already owned by the Library
Gain access to authoring materials so YOU can create and share learning objects!
Open Education Resource Providers
Learning Objects
Educators are making their digital instructional content available for use. Check out these repositories of learning objects, including textbooks.
Affordable Learning Solutions (Hub for locating materials-CSU)
MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching) This CSU initiative has grown into a huge repository of peer-reviewed multimedia learning objects and e-Textbooks created and shared by academics around the world.
OER Commons (free Open Education Resources)
Here's a video (7 min) showing how to search and locate learning materials in OER Commons.
Connexions (an educational content repository and a content management system optimized for the delivery of educational content)
WISC-Online-(Digital learning objects from Wisconsin Technical College System (WTCS)
Khan Academy Videos
Information for Online Courses
Usually free online courses are for those students interested in learning without a need to achieve an academic degree.
They are also a great place to look for reusable content -- most are either openly shared or published with a Creative Commons license, which frequently allows re-use for educational purposes when you credit the source.
Online Courses
Check out MERLOT's listings of online courses (currently over 2900!).
Entitled "Online Courses from World's Experts", not all courses on the udemy site are free, but many are.
Conglomerate list of open courses by discipline.
Open Course Library
The Open Course Library (Washington State College) is a collection of expertly developed educational materials – including textbooks, syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments – in 81 high-enrollment college courses. 42 courses have been completed so far, providing faculty with a high-quality, affordable option that will cost students no more than $30 for textbooks. All materials are shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY) license unless otherwise noted.
42 courses are currently available and another 40 courses will be available Spring 2013. To access the Open Course Library course materials, click on the Read more link below.
Read more
Top Universities with Free Courses
NEW: Princeton, Penn State and Michigan at Ann Arbor join Stanford and UC Berkeley in Coursera
1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (mit.edu)
More than 1,800 free courses are offered through the school's OpenCourseWare (OCW) project. Courses are in text, audio and video formats and translated into a number of different languages. Students all over the world use MIT's OpenCourseWare and 96 percent of visitors to this site say they would recommend it to someone else.
2. Open University (open.ac.uk)
The Open University is the UK's largest academic institution and a world leader in distance learning. OU's OpenLearn website gives everyone free access to both undergraduate and graduate-level course materials from the University. Courses cover a wide range of topics, including the arts, history, business, education, IT and computing, mathematics and statistics, science, health and technology.
3. Carnegie Mellon University (cmu.edu)
Carnegie Mellon University offers a number of free online courses and materials through a program called the Open Learning Initiative. OLI courses are intended to allow anyone at an introductory college level to learn about a particular subject without formal instruction. Course options include such offerings as statistics, biology, chemistry, economics, French and physics.
4. Tufts University (tufts.edu)
Like MIT, Tufts has OpenCourseWare that is available free to everyone. Courses are sorted by school (i.e. the School of Arts and Sciences, the School of Medicine, etc.) and include assignments, lecture notes and other supplementary materials.
5. Stanford (stanford.edu)
Stanford University, one of the world's leading academic institutions, has joined forces with iTunes U to provide access to Stanford courses, lectures and interviews. These courses can be downloaded and played on iPods, PCs and Macs and can also be burned to CDs.
6. University of California, Berkeley (berkeley.edu)
UC Berkeley, one of the best public universities in the nation, has been offering live and on-demand webcasts of many of their courses since 2001. Hundreds of UC Berkeley classes, both current and archived, are now available as podcasts and webcasts. Courses cover a range of subjects, including astronomy, biology, chemistry, computer programming, engineering, psychology, legal studies and philosophy.
7. Utah State University (usu.edu)
Utah State University also provides access to free online courses through OCW. Study options include everything from anthropology to physics and theater arts. These comprehensive text-based courses can be downloaded as zip files or viewed directly on the site.
8. Kutztown University of Pennsylvania (kutztownsbdc.org)
Kutztown University's Small Business Development Center offers the largest collection of free business courses available on the web. Course topics include entrepreneurship, accounting, finance, government, business law, marketing and sales. Comprehensive text, interactive case studies, slides, graphics and streaming audio help to demonstrate the concepts presented in each course.
9. University of Southern Queensland (usq.edu.au)
The University of Southern Queensland in Australia provides free online access to a number of different courses through yet another OpenCourseWare initiative. Courses from each of the five faculties are available covering a broad range of topics, including communication, science, career planning, technology, teaching and multimedia creation.
10. University of California, Irvine (uci.edu)
UC Irvine, another of the nation's top public universities, is also a member of the OCW Consortium. Their growing list of courses covers topics like financial planning, human resources, capital markets and e-marketing. Course materials include syllabi, lecture notes, assignments and exams.
Last Update: 11 Feb 13:39 | Tagged with: textbooks course materials open access