The University of Minnesota has created an Open Textbook Catalog as “a tool to help faculty find more affordable textbook options.” The site goes on to say that all textbooks in the catalog are:

• Openly Licensed. Acceptable licenses include Creative Commons Attribution, Attribution-Share Alike and Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike or similar. Some books may fall under a No-Derivatives license if the publisher offers an adequate customization program.
• Complete. Only complete books, similar to traditional textbooks currently on the market, are included. Materials such as lecture notes, online courses, or drafts, are provided only as supplements to textbooks listed in the catalog.
• Suitable for Adoption Outside the Author’s Institution.
• Available in Print. Because most students still prefer print textbooks to digital, all textbooks include a print option, generally for $40 or less. In some cases, textbooks without a print-on-demand option may be included if they are sufficiently easy and inexpensive to print locally.

As if the world of open content licenses wasn’t confusing already, along comes another one, well, sort of.

Konomark isn’t actually a license, but instead a symbol which you can place on your website

“that lets visitors to your website know that you are generally willing to share your copyrighted content, such as photos, educational materials, music, etc., with folks like yourself, for free. The konomark is an invitation to e-mail you and ask you for permission.”

So slightl different than the Creative Commons approach but with similar ends. Konomark doesn’t remove all of the “friction” from sharing, but it does help you know when asking is worthwhile, and unlikely Creative Commons, very much insists a request be made and acknowledged before the reuse happens.

Very handy site of free, high quality images that you are free to re-use with very little restrictions short of claiming ownership or reselling them “as is.”

There are many ways to search for only Creative Commons-licensed materials, but the new Let’s CC provides one of the most elegant integrated searches for CC materials that I have seen. It allows you to filter by audio, images, rich media or otherwise and searches a large number of sources for reusable material. – SWL

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.

iUniv is a portal of free and open lecture videos which claims to point to recordings from 67498 classes acros hundreds of institutions and subjects.