Plugging open source text books. There are many high quality option out there that are openly licensed. Openstax is a project by Rice University that has textbooks for most gen ed courses.
openstax.org/
Thanks for the link. Didn’t know. Btw, this is why they lobby for state mandates. A single teacher cannot make an exception
Situation in private school is not better. A prominent private high school in Bay Area, made me run around like a crazy man scavenging used books from all over the place because the recommended books were out of stock. They won’t publish the exact book name until after classes begin in August and apparently varies by teacher by year. This is after paying $$$ fees equivalent to buying a new car. Next year I pulled my kid out of it.
I know of a company that had a pretty large set of creative commons licensed learning materials they put together, along with tools to customize lesson plans and rearrange/edit material, make online quizzes, etc. It was offered as a good low cost digital replacement to traditional textbooks, aimed at colleges. Follett, the #1 textbook distributor (which interestingly has common roots with Barnes and Noble) bought the company. Shortly thereafter, the product mentioned was discontinued. The professors that had adopted it, I assume, were somewhat inconvenienced.
