Liz Yang Tadman's Comments

Hi Liz:

No problem!  I know we are all extremely busy.

Thanks so much for your help!

Dear Liz,

Pleasure  to receive communication from you. I will remain in communion with this intellectual commune to the best of my potential.

With  warm wishes.

V.K.Kaul

 

Thank you! I'm happy to join this community. Here at San Jose State University, we're moving forward with an Affordable Learning Solutions initiative, and this site has a lot of great information that can help in our campaign. You can read more about how we're trying to help our students reduce their educational expenses at library.sjsu.edu/als.

Ann

Just want to share this link from UK

www.bookboon.com

open source books in the UK.

Hi Liz!  I have not been on this site for a long while, just really busy.  I am still working on my textbook in Criminal Law, and will be publishing it through Flat World Knowledge.  It should be available January, 2012.  I was just wondering; what would be the best way to let other instructors know that this text is in progress? Because it is really difficult to find criminal justice textbooks that are open access. . . I have done some searches, but cannot find much in this area.  Am I missing something?  Are there open educational resources in criminal justice?  I still need textbooks for my Criminal Procedures, Criminal Evidence, and Constitutional Law courses.  The traditional textbooks are extremely expensive.  Please let me know, thanks!

Thank you Liz, for your warm welcome.

I'm motivated to continue defending the importance of supporting impaired and disabled people.

Carla

Hi Liz,
Thank you very much for the welcome and the links. I am hoping to raise awareness of open access resources, especially textbooks, on my campus this year. Not just for our online faculty, but for everyone.

OER and other online resources are very valuable to distance learners, because of the difficulty of shipping print materials around the world. I have, several times, gotten queries from overseas students who simply haven't gotten their textbooks at the start of class.

Format issues, however, can be troublesome. I had a classmate in an online program who was in the US military. She could not download readers to their military issued computer, so if it wasn't a standard format (PDF or MS doc at the time) or viewable in a browser she was unable to read it. I have had students trying to work at corporate offices who have the same problem. They can get permission to spend time on their education, but not to download readers to actually get that education. Standardization of formats is crucial.

--Rebecca Hedreen
Coordinator for Distance Learning at Buley Library
Southern Connecticut State University

Hi Liz,

I'm sorry that we didn't get a chance to introduce ourselves yesterday, especially since we were sitting right beside each other....

Bookshare is an online accessible library for people who are blind and print-disabled. Just last year we started adding open textbooks to our collection. We receive various formats from open content producers ranging from ePubs, which we love, to Docbook and custom XML, and PDFs. EPubs are by far the easiest to convert to Daisy 3 and .brf (Braille ready format) that can be read by accessible technology devices and screen readers because we have a conversion program that automatically converts the file. We also recently built a Docbook converter. PDFs are more challenging because file setup preferences make auto conversion difficult, so manual intervention is still required, which is time consuming. Standardization in the open textbook community (to ePub) would help us out tremendously!

Nicole Gnutzman
Director, Literacy Operations
Bookshare, a Benetech Initiative

Thank you Liz for your warm welcome!

Thank you for the welcome. I'm pleased to join this group.

I do have a question. I wanted to join the workshop on July 30, but I couldn't fine a link to register. How does this workshop work?

Thanks!

I will be happy to work with you regarding college textbooks. There is much to be done in this area. My PhD focus was curriculum development. Well written textbooks that provide good curriculum design is essential. Pheo :)

Thanks Liz. I am actually working on editing a guide for higher ed governance officials with Hal Plotkin that should be available in the fall. It is intended as a basic guide for policy makers with little OER exposure.

Thank you so much for response to me, Liz. You are my first "friend" other than my local colleagues, and I appreciate that!
- Bob Yavits
- Tompkins Cortland Community College

Liz,

Thanks for adding the great picture to the Librarians' Group!

Angela

I'm working on materials for a textbook in Criminal Law. I'm not sure if I want to offer it as open source. I'm thinking more along the lines of eminently affordable. Textbooks in my discipline average $150 hardback, and $90 ebook. I know I can do better (much better) than this!

Thanks for the welcome, At this point I think so many folks are still struggling to wrap their brains around the OER concept, and we have to learn to think differently instead of just a book online that you could print or bind, I'm hoping to draw from several sources to round out the concepts I want my Soc 101 students to take away from my class. I'm so excited!

Liz - I'm currently working on developing open source materials for a beginning/intermediate algebra course that I plan to use next year. I'm interested in what's out there to supplement what I already have. Thanks for welcoming me to the group!