Univ. of Minnesota Compiles Database of Peer-Reviewed, Open-Access Textbooks 54
First time accepted submitter BigVig209 writes "Univ. of MN is cataloging open-access textbooks and enticing faculty to review the texts by offering $500 per review. From the article: 'The project is meant to address two faculty critiques of open-source texts: they are hard to locate and they are of indeterminate quality. By building up a peer-reviewed collection of textbooks, available to instructors anywhere, Minnesota officials hope to provide some of the same quality control that historically has come from publishers of traditional textbooks.'"
Re:What about schools? (Score:4, Interesting)
From the government, which currently pays textbook publishers to make them.
Have University math departments make math texts for grade sxhools. University history departments can make history texts, etc.
The projects could be cooperative among the state governments. And since there would be no profit motive to keep obsolescing old texts you wouldn't have so much churn or so many errors.
"same quality control"?!? (Score:5, Interesting)
I hope the open access books don't have the same quality control as from traditional publishers. My daughter's in high school and has some pretty atrocious text books. In her AP history class, the teacher dislikes the book so much (for organizational and content reasons) that she has supplied alternative materials as much as possible, mostly at her own expense. She still has to "teach the book" to meet state requirements, but that doesn't mean the text is beyond reproach (and perhaps just the opposite, given the politicized lobby-driven nature of text book selection these days; I live in Texas so it's a bit of a sore point with me).
I think the Wikipedia-style crowd-sourced approach holds tremendous promise, especially if there is an active feedback mechanism where kids and parents can be involved as well as educators. The power of many, many people each providing a little bit of the work is staggering and inspiring. As long as the publishing lobby doesn't buy any protective legislation, this is an experiment I'm looking forward to.