open textbooks
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The urgent need for the UK Open Textbook pivot
It seems that the online pivot may prove to be the point at which UK Higher education becomes interested in open textbooks. A few years ago we carried out some research on the UK Open textbook project. looking at differences between North America (where the idea of open textbooks had taken off to an extent) and the UK (where it hadn’t). There were some cultural differences which accounted for this, for instance the cost of textbooks in the UK did not form such a substantial percentage of an undergraduate’s overall expenditure, and UK academics tended to use a range of textbooks on reading lists, rather than specifying one. This lessened…
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The OU as your new favourite open textbook provider
via GIPHY TL;DR – the Open University has an excellent range of free ebooks on Amazon or from the OU which you should check out. What’s in a label? To absolutely no-one’s surprise, the answer is, ‘quite a lot it seems’. The Open University has a very successful (even more successful since the pandemic) OER site, OpenLearn. We tend to think of this in terms of individual resources and short courses. It comes in a number of different download formats, including ePub. What triggered my ‘what’s in a label’ comment is that we also list all the ebooks on Amazon in Kindle format. These should be available in most countries…
