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Rice University professor Richard Baraniuk explains the vision behind Connexions, his open-source, online education system. It cuts out the textbook, allowing teachers to share and modify course materials freely, anywhere in the world.
I think that this is a great idea. I was always hoping that textbooks were going to be the next thing that would be shared since education is the most important aspect of a person’s life and should not have to be so costly. If everyone has an opportunity to learn and share their knowledge with others in an open source format that is only better for the world as a whole. Unfortunately, many universities still use textbooks and schools rather not use open source because they make a lot of money from selling textbooks to students. Thus, students have to look all over the web for cheap textbooks and places to sell their textbooks. I just want to mention a website called skoolboy.com that does both, you can list your textbooks for free and find cheap textbooks as well as other things that college students need like cellphones they might have lost, and laptops that were stolen or are broken. its a new site but i think its worth checking out.
