Free MIT Engineering Text For Download

An anonymous reader writes " The (sci-tech) Library Question is reporting, "The third edition of A Heat Transfer Textbook, written by John H Lienhard V (MIT) and John H Lienhard IV (U Houston), has been made available on the web. The book is an introduction to heat transfer, geared towards engineering students. It may be downloaded free of charge. The authors explain: We are placing a mechanical engineering textbook into an electronic format for worldwide, no-charge distribution. The aim of this effort is to explore the possibilities of placing textbooks online -- effectively giving them away. Two potential benefits should accrue from doing this. First, in electronic format, textbooks can be continually corrected and updated, without the delays inherent in printed books (second and later editions are typically published on a five-year cycle). Second, free textbooks hold the potential for fundamentally altering the economics of higher education, particularly in those environments where money is scarce."

Comments

Assuming some honesty...

[Denyer]

...on the part of people who complete the download form, this is also an opportunity for authors to gain feedback from parts of the readership demographic they wouldn't normally be in contact with.

With some engineering and science -related courses suffering from low levels of interest, a wider availability of resources could (as the article suggests) draw out those who aren't applying for financial reasons, whilst giving others a taste of subjects and their potential uses in picking a career path and making a difference. After all, most people have felt they've had a good idea or two at some time or other... many have been discouraged only by the lack of readily available background knowledge.

Yay for more open learning!

When can we start

[beachplum]

Free textbooks online? The ability to continually update and correct errors and misinformation? Sign me up.

Also, one of the big issues in textbook publication is that the information included sometimes can be determined by what state publishes the text - this is especially true in history and biology, both of which are full of political dynamite.

Maybe eventually this will lead to a freer exchange of information.

Re:Good start, but we need GPL multimedia textbook

[Teancum]

I was a part of a "research project" funded by the U.S. Department of Education for $750,000 that was to do exactly what you are saying here. We were trying to develop multimedia development tools that could be used to help instructors put together instructional multimedia software.

The software we developed (I was the programmer on the project) was used for several classes on campus at Utah State University, where the project was based from, under the direction of Dr. R. Kent Wood (he has since retired). Our primary emphasis was more toward K-12 learning, but it proved to be quite popular with several computer-based learning groups including C.A.L.I.C.O, a group of individuals working on acquiring forign language skills through computer-based learning.

There are several issues that need to be dealt with in regards to multimedia development. Some of them have been solved compared to what I was dealing with in the past, but some still are huge problems:

• Multimedia standards - This is one of the areas that due to the emergence of the World Wide Web and other generally open applications has pushed this forward quite a bit. MPEG, PNG (MNG), and other standardized formats have really made a difference over the zoo of incompatable formats that there were even 10 years ago. There is still need to do more work in this area, and there are some items that really need review. Multimedia game design and the entertainment industry, unfortunately, are the major drivers of this sort of activity.
• Accessable Multimedia Materials - Due to the "eternal" copyright of many multimedia types (photos, audio clips, cinema in all its flavors) are copyrighted and impossible to use as "fair-use" for educational purposes except on a very limited basis. Court ruling on this strongly favor the media companies and make it almost impossible to use anything that is available. The Google image search is essentially worthless if you want to use it in any instructional software that would be used for more than a single section of a single course taught at only one university. I would love to see a Multi-media variant of Project Gutenberg where you could get central repository of multimedia items (a clip art library, music clips, video, etc.) that would be guarenteed to be totally public domain or released in some copyleft arrangement. There is quite a bit on the internet, but it is scattered around and really needs to be put together. There are some collections (I happen to have some content I'd like to donate) that simply needs to be put together, scanned, and released. If I had infinite resources and time I'd like to do this, and if it isn't going by the time I get close to retirement, I may get this going myself anyway. I just need to feed my family for now.
• Authoring System Support - There needs to be a standardizing the "glue" format that holds all of this multimedia information together with Unicode-based text that is appropriate in a computer-based learning environment needs to be worked out. HTML and its variants are pretty good, and there some fairly decent "authoring" tools available such as Authorware or Director, but these all have some hard limitations. The High Schools that I've seen are typically either using HTML or Power Point (I am not kidding here either) for routine stuff that is developed. University-level instruction is totally non-standard and often includes custom software written for the one project, which eats up almost all the time and resources of the project. Ideally I'd love to see an open-source project that would help put this sort of instruction together. It needs to be easy to use, but powerful enough that if you are willing to learn (with a shallow learning curve) you can get progressively more features to the point that you can write the entire authoring environment in itself (aka be Turing complete). Nothing I know of has this capability at th