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The California Open Source Textbook Project (COSTP) was founded in 2000 by Sanford Forte, a former college textbook publishing executive. COSTP was a not-for-profit, collaborative, public/private undertaking originally created to address the high cost, content range, and consistent shortages of K-12 textbooks in California. COSTP's mandate later expanded to include undergraduate and graduate university instructional materials, covering the entire K-20 range.
COSTP's main goals were as follows:
The cost of textbooks had risen steadily over the years preceding COSTP's founding. Critics contended that publishing companies artificially increased prices and essentially shut out competing efforts to liberate academic content from traditional copyright control. On COSTP's inception, the State of California was spending more than US$400M annually for K-12 textbooks, yet textbook shortages were not uncommon. Cost and access were becoming serious issues—projected to get worse as enrollments to K-12 institutions were projected to dramatically increase over the next decade.
COSTP employed the advantages of open-sourced content and innovative licensing tools in an effort to inspire significantly reduced K-12 textbook costs—with the hope of eventually turning K-12 curriculum and textbook construction from a cost into a revenue generator for the State of California. Open sourced, distributed content was intended to be made available gratis by deploying innovative copyright tools provided by organizations like Creative Commons, its partners, and other organizations. COSTP made important contributions to the many organizations that followed in its wake, as the "Open Educational Content" movement took hold over the next 10–15 years.
It is important to note that COSTP's mandate was not to replace printed textbooks, but simply make them less expensive to produce and distribute, thus creating many additional efficiencies in the K-12 academic content sector.
COSTP eventually graduated into a consulting role for many new entries to the Open Educational Resource (OER) sector, assisting many institutions with business modeling and analysis of textbook and online education markets, worldwide.
MIT OpenCourseWare is an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to publish all of the educational materials from its undergraduate- and graduate-level courses online, freely and openly available to anyone, anywhere. The project was announced on April 4, 2001, and uses Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. The program was originally funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and MIT. MIT OpenCourseWare is supported by MIT, corporate underwriting, major gifts, and donations from site visitors. The initiative inspired a number of other institutions to make their course materials available as open educational resources.
A textbook is a book containing a comprehensive compilation of content in a branch of study with the intention of explaining it. Textbooks are produced to meet the needs of educators, usually at educational institutions. Schoolbooks are textbooks and other books used in schools. Today, many textbooks are published in both print and digital formats.
In education, a curriculum is broadly defined as the totality of student experiences that occur in the educational process. The term often refers specifically to a planned sequence of instruction, or to a view of the student's experiences in terms of the educator's or school's instructional goals. A curriculum may incorporate the planned interaction of pupils with instructional content, materials, resources, and processes for evaluating the attainment of educational objectives. Curricula are split into several categories: the explicit, the implicit, the excluded, and the extracurricular.
M-learning or mobile learning is "learning across multiple contexts, through social and content interactions, using personal electronic devices". A form of distance education, m-learners use mobile device educational technology at their convenience time.
Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials intentionally created and licensed to be free for the end user to own, share, and in most cases, modify. The term "OER" describes publicly accessible materials and resources for any user to use, re-mix, improve, and redistribute under some licenses. These are designed to reduce accessibility barriers by implementing best practices in teaching and to be adapted for local unique contexts.
Open innovation is a term used to promote an information age mindset toward innovation that runs counter to the secrecy and silo mentality of traditional corporate research labs. The benefits and driving forces behind increased openness have been noted and discussed as far back as the 1960s, especially as it pertains to interfirm cooperation in R&D. Use of the term 'open innovation' in reference to the increasing embrace of external cooperation in a complex world has been promoted in particular by Henry Chesbrough, adjunct professor and faculty director of the Center for Open Innovation of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, and Maire Tecnimont Chair of Open Innovation at Luiss.
An open-source curriculum (OSC) is an online instructional resource that can be freely used, distributed and modified. OSC is based on the open-source practice of creating products or software that opens up access to source materials or codes. Applied to education, this process invites feedback and participation from developers, educators, government officials, students and parents and empowers them to exchange ideas, improve best practices and create world-class curricula. These "development" communities can form ad-hoc, within the same subject area or around a common student need, and allow for a variety of editing and workflow structures.
Virginia Open Education Foundation (VOEF) is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) corporation dedicated to bringing curriculum and educational content resources to the K-12 students of the Commonwealth of Virginia through open education. It was started and is currently directed by Middlesex County Public Schools Technology Director Mark Burnet.
The Global Text Project (GTP) is a not for profit organization dedicated to the creation, translation, and distribution of free open content textbooks over the Internet. It is an open educational resources project focusing on reaching university students mainly in developing countries, where textbooks are often expensive and not affordable. Textbooks are necessary and crucial for higher education, but they are becoming increasingly expensive, even in the United States. Between 1998 and 2014 textbook prices increased by 161 percent. And since 1977, textbook prices in the country have risen 1,041 percent, more than triple the overall rate of U.S. inflation. Two major reasons that could be affecting textbook prices are the constant publication of new editions, and extra material bundled into the textbooks.
Open education is an educational movement founded on openness, with connections to other educational movements such as critical pedagogy, and with an educational stance which favours widening participation and inclusiveness in society. Open education broadens access to the learning and training traditionally offered through formal education systems and is typically offered through online and distance education. The qualifier "open" refers to the elimination of barriers that can preclude both opportunities and recognition for participation in institution-based learning. One aspect of openness or "opening up" education is the development and adoption of open educational resources in support of open educational practices.
Free content, libre content, libre information, or free information, is any kind of functional work, work of art, or other creative content that meets the definition of a free cultural work.
An open textbook is a textbook licensed under an open license, and made available online to be freely used by students, teachers and members of the public. Many open textbooks are distributed in either print, e-book, or audio formats that may be downloaded or purchased at little or no cost.
Open Learning Exchange Nepal is a social benefit organization working to increase access to education through the integration of technology. Founded in 2007, the organization aims to increase the quality of education through the creation of open-source digital learning activities combined with teacher training.
The CK-12 Foundation is a California-based non-profit organization which aims to increase access to low-cost K-12 education in the United States and abroad. CK-12 provides free and customizable K-12 open educational resources aligned to state curriculum standards. As of 2022, the foundation's tools were used by over 200,000,000 students worldwide.
The Berlin School of Library and Information Science at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin offers study programmes at three levels: bachelors, masters, and doctoral. It is the only institute in Germany with a doctoral programme and the right to award doctorates. Research methods are also an integral part of the pre-doctoral curriculum.
Open educational practices (OEP) are part of the broader open education landscape, including the openness movement in general. It is a term with multiple layers and dimensions and is often used interchangeably with open pedagogy or open practices. OEP represent teaching and learning techniques that draw upon open and participatory technologies and high-quality open educational resources (OER) in order to facilitate collaborative and flexible learning. Because OEP emerged from the study of OER, there is a strong connection between the two concepts. OEP, for example, often, but not always, involve the application of OER to the teaching and learning process. Open educational practices aim to take the focus beyond building further access to OER and consider how in practice, such resources support education and promote quality and innovation in teaching and learning. The focus in OEP is on reproduction/understanding, connecting information, application, competence, and responsibility rather than the availability of good resources. OEP is a broad concept which can be characterised by a range of collaborative pedagogical practices that include the use, reuse, and creation of OER and that often employ social and participatory technologies for interaction, peer-learning, knowledge creation and sharing, empowerment of learners, and open sharing of teaching practices.
OpenStax is a nonprofit educational technology initiative based at Rice University. Since 2012, OpenStax has created peer-reviewed, openly-licensed textbooks, which are available in free digital formats and for a low cost in print. Most books are also available in Kindle versions on Amazon.com and in the iBooks Store. OpenStax's first textbook was College Physics, which was published online, in print, and in iBooks in 2012. OpenStax launched OpenStax Tutor Beta in June 2017, adaptive courseware based on cognitive science principles, machine learning, and OpenStax content. However, announced in October 2022 that Tutor was being discontinued.
Open Course Library (OCL) is an effort by the State of Washington to identify and make available digitally, to community and technical college instructors and students across that state, free textbooks, interactive assignments, and videos. Instructional materials can be "a smorgasbord of teaching modules and exercises developed by other open-learning projects.. . Interactive-learning Web sites and even instructional videos on YouTube. . ." However, OCL is not an OER publishing project, although it did contribute to the development of some widely used resources. Goals include: lowering textbook costs for students, providing new resources for faculty to use in their courses; and fully engaging in the global OER or open educational resources discussion.
Educational technology in sub-Saharan Africa refers to the promotion, development and use of information and communication technologies (ICT), m-learning, media, and other technological tools to improve aspects of education in sub-Saharan Africa. Since the 1960s, various information and communication technologies have aroused strong interest in sub-Saharan Africa as a way of increasing access to education, and enhancing its quality and fairness.
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration. A main principle of open-source software development is peer production, with products such as source code, blueprints, and documentation freely available to the public. The open-source movement in software began as a response to the limitations of proprietary code. The model is used for projects such as in open-source appropriate technology, and open-source drug discovery.