Saylor offers millions of dollars in bounties for open textbooks
1–10 of 26 posts
Re: Saylor offers millions of dollars in bounties for open textbooks
#2Great idea. They should offer smaller bounties for texts that don't meet the criteria, but would with some work, proportionate to how much work needs to be done. Though it seems that just evaluating them requires considerable effort.
Re: Saylor offers millions of dollars in bounties for open textbooks
#3Rather than Saylor decide on what to buy and at what price, I wonder if they could use a kickstarter-like model. If they matched individual donations, they could make their money go further & get some genuine measure of community support/interest in different texts.
Re: Saylor offers millions of dollars in bounties for open textbooks
#4This sounds like a wonderful project. There's honestly no reason that this couldn't take off for most lower-level undergraduate classes. It would certainly kill off a large portion of the textbook publishing business, but they needed to die anyway.
Re: Saylor offers millions of dollars in bounties for open textbooks
#5I think this is a great idea.
I lectured at a college for a few years. One class I lectured for was an intro class with 500+ students a trimester. The Course Admin wrote the text and seemed to update it often. I had seen the different versions. The updates were minor and the text was still out of date by at least 10 years.
The only way to change the text was to get a different Course Admin.
Sadly, there seems to be a lot of money to be made by professors requiring their text books in college.
Re: Saylor offers millions of dollars in bounties for open textbooks
#6How cool. $20,000 per text is much more than most textbook authors are claiming they are getting from the publishers.
Re: Saylor offers millions of dollars in bounties for open textbooks
#7Linear Algebra seems to be missing in the mathematics section of the list of eligible courses. I'd have thought it would be pretty fundamental. Hefferon's text is under the GPL and might be eligible.
Re: Saylor offers millions of dollars in bounties for open textbooks
#8Great idea.
Our body of scientific knowledge deserves to be both free (beer & speech) and open to all. There shouldn't be a significant cost to access it (apart from the education level).
Our aim should be build our global, connected society on the basis of free, open and life long education.
Sure this takes some capital cost to start. But the benefits could be massive: comparable to those realised when patents were first introduced. By freeing knowledge from its artificial shackles we'll enable a whole generation of advancement in the application of our science. Where there's a will, we will provide the way.
It makes me think that people such as Bill Gates and William S. Dietrich II could do worse than to fund this sort of project and its obvious complement (a proper, free-distribution alternative to the academic publishers).
Re: Saylor offers millions of dollars in bounties for open textbooks
#9I don't know if I am as gung ho about this idea as others are. The difference between the best analysis book (i.e. Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis) and the average analysis book is so significant as to justify the far higher bounty required to move baby Rudin into the creative commons.
Re: Saylor offers millions of dollars in bounties for open textbooks
#10Their submission form is ridiculous.
http://www.saylor.org/otc-form/
I was going to submit this: http://bob.cs.sonoma.edu/IntroCompOrg_Jan_2011.pdf
An excellent (imo) book on introductory assembly and computer organization, but I'm not going to write out their "course mapping forms" and send in my resume just to submit it.
They can't be serious.