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Free Open Textbooks and Resources

If you are planning your next semester for your students, you might want to consider using some open source textbooks for them to use instead of purchasing or renting. I know that my students have commented on their appreciation of me providing them a free open source text over them having to purchase an additional book. I believe that the numbers that I read before were along the line of undergraduates having an ongoing credit card debt of over $5K, and graduate students of over $8K, a good portion of which was attributed to extra costs at college/university of which a big part was textbooks. I know that the college board estimates that the average student spends about $1200 on books and supplies and that a single book can cost as much as $200. I read that according to National Association of College Stores, the average price of a new textbook increased from $57 in 2007 to $65 in 2010 and to $79 in 2013, which would include some pretty low cost required reading like paperback novels, so book costs on campus are up. While open source textbooks won't solve all your student texts issues (like you will need to remind them that they should read the book - but you can often link sections in your online class space), it can save quite a bit of cost for the students. As faculty though, you will have to take the steps and explore the book options available for you and your classes, there will be no book rep coming by to show you what would work for your class load.
 With that in mind here are some places that provide open source textbooks:

BCcampus OpenEd: https://open.bccampus.ca/ 
Center for Open Education: http://open.umn.edu/?id=pirg
College Open Textbooks:  http://www.collegeopentextbooks.org/
Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources: https://oerconsortium.org/discipline-specific/
Global Text Project: http://globaltext.terry.uga.edu/
Lumen Learning: http://lumenlearning.com/ 
Melot II: https://www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm
MIT Open Course Ware: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/online-textbooks/ 
OER Commons: https://www.oercommons.org/
Open Culture: http://www.openculture.com/free_textbooks 
Open SUNY Textbooks: http://textbooks.opensuny.org/ 
OpenStax: https://openstaxcollege.org/books 
Open Textbook Library: http://research.cehd.umn.edu/otn/ 
OER K12 Resources/Textbooks
CK-12 Foundation: http://www.ck12.org/ 
Curriki: http://www.curriki.org/
Gooru: http://www.gooru.org/#home
Kahn Academy: https://www.khanacademy.org/
Knovation Content Collection: http://www.knovationlearning.com/solutions/content-collection/
OpenEd: https://www.opened.com/
PowerMyLearning: http://powermylearning.org/

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