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

Posted by msmash on Thursday June 16, 2016 @05:20AM from the fixing-the-system dept.

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.

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Kids these days... by __aaclcg7560 · 2016-06-16 05:29 · Score: -1, Offtopic

When I went to college, one person would buy a textbook, make five copies for himself and his friends, and returned the textbook for a refund. Some instructors were sympathetic, others were not (especially if they wrote the textbook). The book buyer at the bookstore sometimes refused to buy back brand new books with broken spines that got stretched out from photocopying.