Through projects like https://www.gutenberg.org a lot of old books that are past their copyright period (often 70 years or more old) are being made available free online. For many students this is an opportunity to get books they could not otherwise afford. Do you know of free online books that are relevant for students? One example from my own perpective is the wonderful book about experiments with developing excellent learning inviroments https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48906
Hi!
Quality of text books is a complex issue, as is well known. One teacher loves a book that another teacher despises. There are also the questions of levels.
in the US there seems to have been a lot of development on the area free textbooks in recent years, especially on the community college level. It is hard enough for student and parents to pay tuition fees, and when traditional textbooks cost more than that, it is easy to give up because of limited resources.
A voice and agent in this development has been David Wiley from Brigham Young University. See an interesting article here https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-05-23-oer-pioneer-david-wiley-predicts-all-community-colleges-will-dump-traditional-textbooks-by-2024 He now runs a company trying to help the situation of free learning materials.
See some sites offering free textbooks for college use here: https://www.careeraddict.com/5-fantastic-websites-that-offer-free-college-textbooks - there are more such sites. See also the initiative wikibooks, wikiversity and wikisource (all linked from wikipedia.org main site) where you can contribute and adapt texts yourself.
One possible downside with free textbooks is that students and teachers have to learn how to work with the digital format; how to get overview, how to mark important sections, etc. The printed book format is very well implemented...and almost always has a cost with it. So has printouts of free digital materials If you cannot learn from them in digital form.
Hi!
Quality of text books is a complex issue, as is well known. One teacher loves a book that another teacher despises. There are also the questions of levels.
in the US there seems to have been a lot of development on the area free textbooks in recent years, especially on the community college level. It is hard enough for student and parents to pay tuition fees, and when traditional textbooks cost more than that, it is easy to give up because of limited resources.
A voice and agent in this development has been David Wiley from Brigham Young University. See an interesting article here https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-05-23-oer-pioneer-david-wiley-predicts-all-community-colleges-will-dump-traditional-textbooks-by-2024 He now runs a company trying to help the situation of free learning materials.
See some sites offering free textbooks for college use here: https://www.careeraddict.com/5-fantastic-websites-that-offer-free-college-textbooks - there are more such sites. See also the initiative wikibooks, wikiversity and wikisource (all linked from wikipedia.org main site) where you can contribute and adapt texts yourself.
One possible downside with free textbooks is that students and teachers have to learn how to work with the digital format; how to get overview, how to mark important sections, etc. The printed book format is very well implemented...and almost always has a cost with it. So has printouts of free digital materials If you cannot learn from them in digital form.
Probably worth stating what topics you are interested in. Two very useful ones in my area, for intros in statistics/machine learning, are:
https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/Papers/ESLII.pdf
and the more intro version of it:
http://faculty.marshall.usc.edu/gareth-james/ISL/ISLR%20Seventh%20Printing.pdf
I assume they had a deal with Springer that once a few printing were done it could be placed on the web.
Daniel Wright Anders Norberg Samy Azer Dervla Kelly Thank you for your input. I have students that work in higher education that are trying to get to know how to find learning resources that are of good quality and that are free. Several work in countries were there is not much money to buy books. I write books myself, and love paper books. The situation in many their cases is getting hold of books at all. By sharing your experiences with free books you are contributing in a way that is very helpful.
I had all her books (36), tutorials, and articles are placed in full open free access on its website: http://lc.kubagro.ru/ and on other platforms.
On the net there are thousands of free good books in all disciplines and for all university levels and others
I know a couple of free online university level book sources:
https://ndl.iitkgp.ac.in/
https://libgen.is/
You may find those interesting.
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