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College courses without textbooks? These schools are giving it a shot
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Washington Post
Posted: May 15th, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/06/1...
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. 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 group 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. Officials at Achieving the Dream say there are enough open-source materials to replace textbooks in all required courses for degrees in business administration, general education, computer science and social science. The initiative will [benefit] at least 76,000 students. The schools will turn the material into a digital library for public consumption. Print textbook prices have climbed 82 percent in the past decade, [and] can account for a third of the costs community college students encounter.
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