38 Community Colleges Launch Entire Degree Programs With Open Educational Resources (washingtonpost.com)

Danielle Douglas-Gabriel, writing for The Washington Post: A community college reform group has selected a handful of schools in Virginia and Maryland to develop degree programs using open-source materials in place of textbooks, an initiative that could save students as much as $1,300 a year (could be paywalled; alternate source). Such open educational resources -- created using open licenses that let students download or print materials for free -- have gained popularity as the price of print textbooks have skyrocketed, but courses that use the materials remain a novelty in higher education. Achieving the Dream, an education advocacy groups based in Silver Spring, Md., aims to change that by offering $9.8 million in grants to support the development of open-source degree programs at 38 colleges in 13 states.

Comments

Use better textbooks

[bluefoxlucid]

I'm trying to sort out books that cover all the material in fewer pages, lower book cost, and appreciable organization. I'm finding that some books for things like programming language design or computer science cost $20 or $50 and have clearer, more concise explanations than 1,000-page McGraw Hill tomes that cost $348.

...I don't care to study compsci in college; I dropped out. I'm looking at my local college's curriculum and syllabus for each class, snagging my own books, and self-studying. This may be more or less efficient (I can *certainly* learn 4 years of material in 6 months's time; however some of these courses have a discussion format, which I can only approximate by myself, and so some insights will grind in a lot less smoothly). Mathematics is also a lot harder to self-teach in a high-quality manner; most material is college text and, as mentioned above, most college textbooks are hunks of shit.

Education incurs cognitive load. Bad education curriculum and bad materials increase cognitive load. Good study strategies decrease cognitive load. Approaching material using strong study methods--Cornell notes, SQW4R/OK4R study methods, self-testing, group discussion--increases the rate of learning and memorization while reducing cognitive load. Using better material decreases the cognitive load incurred by using those study methods (or not using any study methods). With better study strategies, better material, or both, education is faster and more successful.