The Open Course Library, run out of the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, announced the release of 41 full online courses as part of Phase 1 of the project. These courses are a collection of expertly developed educational materials for high enrolled college courses. The materials — including textbooks, syllabi, activities, readings, assessments — are freely available online under an open license for use by anyone worldwide. The project is set to expand to 81 courses by 2013.

[N.B. I have compiled a spreadsheet of all 41 courses with direct links to the IMS Common Cartridge Exports at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ah68UXI2Wb8-dFZmODc1cV95Vm5IWHNwUU9zY05SdHc These should be directly importable into D2L & Blackboard. Moodle's IMS CC import is not fully functional yet, but when it is, these should be easily importable there too. - SWL]

The Saylor Foundation has an interesting proposition for existing textbook authors – if you have a textbook for which you own the intellectual property rights, they are willing to offer you $20,000 to relicense the work under a Creative Commons license and thus create another Open Textbook. There are certain criteria that need to be met, and they are looking for textbooks in specific areas. The submission deadline is November 1, 2011 – so what are you waiting for? – SWL

The British Library has released 1000 books from its 19th Century collection into a free iPad app that includes novels, historical works, poetry, philosophy and scientific books.

This 6 week course run as part of the P2PU will explore the cultural shift of using open educational resources and how it can benefit both educators and learners.

Story in the Edmonton Journal about how Alberta’s Advanced Education minister hopes to cut student textbook fees in half by setting up a provincewide online book depository next year.

I am usually loathe to link to lists like this as they are created by companies almost solely to increase their placement in search engines, but in this case, it is not a bad list. 25 places to find free books online. How does this Open Education? Well, when it comes to original texts to be studied in class, the option to get free electronic versions is another way the choices professors make can help save students money.

Doug Holton, an instructor in the Instructional Tech and Learning department at Utah State Uinversity, has compiled a useful post pointing to freely available books concerning Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) Education. These aren’t *textbooks* but instead free resources pointing to the future of education in these areas.