The Free Textbook Project

Our Philosophy

The Free Textbook project is dedicated to creating and sharing educational materials that are free in cost and free such that everyone is free to use, change, and redistribute the materials as long as they give everyone else the freedom to do the same.

About textbooks

Textbooks and educational materials are complex and intricate creations with myriad goals. Some goals are nationally or regionally motivated, ranging from issues of cultural relevance to national standards. There are goals for meeting the needs of educators, their pedagogies, and to provide lesson plans and units that can be integrated into specific types of curriculum. And there are goals for students, from keeping their attention to meeting a wide variety of learning styles, which may include mixing story telling with definitions and providing a wide variety of problems at varying levels of difficulty. Each subject, grade level, and target audience and school has a different set of needs that a good textbook tries to satisfy.

How volunteers can create textbooks

With all of the many goals that go into creating a single textbook, it begs the question, how can a geographicailly dispersed community of volunteers working seperately make a textbook together? Well, this is an unsolved problem, and we do not have the solution. However, we do have a strategy and an approach we are taking.

Our thought was that instead of trying to create unified textbooks, or even small educational modules and teaching materials, that we would focus on providing small projects that achieve many of the individual goals that make up a textbook. These sub-projects will range from creating collections of problems to providing collections of templates
for formatting educational content in various forms.

In this way, volunteers have a wide range of entry points into
contributing to the free textbook project. They can submit a multiple choice history question (and answer!) to our problems collection; they can contribute a two-column LaTeX template full of math equations to our LaTeX template collection; or they can supply a list of names and cultural items that would integrate well into a word problem.

This content can be carried over and integrated with the various other textbook and educational projects or volunteers can work together to build lesson plans or put together an entire textbook or section of a textbook.

We hope that each project within the free textbook project will have a sensible set of rules and best practices that govern it and that the results of these projects will be measurable. Lastly, we hope that the materials that are added to each project are of immediate use to students, educators, and to people who are creating educational and teaching materials.

Development Philosophy

Many of the existing education projects out there are primarily
focused on developing software and standards with the hope that educators and volunteers will propogate their web sites with educational and teaching materials once a framework has been built.

This project takes the philosophy that software and standards should be based upon the data that is collected and the problems you are trying to solve. We place priority in technology projects that make it easy for contributors to contribute and organize the data.