Free Curricula Center
Free Curricula Center
URL = http://www.freecurricula.org/
Description
"The Free Curricula Center (FCC) helps students worldwide reach their educational potential by producing and distributing university level curricula that can be copied freely and modified cooperatively.
Specifically, FCC serves as a focal point for the development and sharing of textbooks, instructor guides, and other educational materials. These materials, called free curricula, are released at no cost into the public domain or under an "open source" style license. This license allows anyone to make and distribute copies without having to pay, and to modify the curricula as long as those modifications are released under the same terms.
The Center helps its participants work together to create textbooks, instructor guides, and other materials for the subjects in which they have expertise. We do this by providing online tools to help educators collaborate successfully and by proving a space on the Internet where students can have free, easy access to their finished products. We also serve as a link to the resources of others, and mirror their material when permitted.
FCC's principle objective is to reduce to zero the cost of educational materials for students and learning institutions. Students have acquiesced to textbooks required for their classes being a significant cost each term. Even at universities attended mostly by the wealthy one sees a burgeoning trade in used and pirated textbooks. Many institutions around the world operate as best they can with extremely limited funds, serving students without the means to expend a great deal. Tribal colleges in the U.S., universities in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world, and any institution accustomed to doing more with less can well appreciate one of its students' principal costs being lessened or even eliminated.
In short, the Center wants to do for educational curricula what open source software has done for computing: focus cooperative efforts to bring about low cost, high quality alternatives to commercial products."