Professor Mark J. Perry's Blog for Economics and Finance
The rising cost of textbooks—along with the rise of easy-to-use publishing tools online—has helped drive the popularity of open-source materials and professors’ taking a do-it-yourself approach to textbook publishing. The Chronicle of Higher Education features three professors who wrote their own textbooks and are distributing them free.
Dr. Mark J. Perry is a professor of economics and finance in the School of Management at the Flint campus of the University of Michigan. Perry holds two graduate degrees in economics (M.A. and Ph.D.) from George Mason University near Washington, D.C. In addition, he holds an MBA degree in finance from the Curtis L. Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. In addition to a faculty appointment at the University of Michigan-Flint, Perry is also a visiting scholar at The American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.
3 Comments:
'free' online text books, eh?
Prof. Mark, would you do that for your classes?
David Levinson of U of Minn has Wiki Text book "Fundementals of Transportation". The Wiki aspect I think is key to getting the proper polish with minimal cost.
Link to wikibook: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Fundamentals_of_Transportation
Levinson is also using interactive software (similar idea to Thrun at Udacity.) to teach his students.
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/levin031/transportationist/2012/06/street-where-simulation-meets.html
This is just terrific ... those that want to learn are not inhibited by the prices charged for books and other learning material
There are many courses where a lot of core material is available for free - I imagine that today, it is indeed possible to teach some core classes in many disciplines without an assigned textbook - but with assigned links ...
Now, if we can wean educational institutions off commercial software like Operating Systems and Word Processing software (!) (Oh yes, there are terrific alternatives and almost all of them better than the commercial ones)
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