Thursday, January 21, 2010

That'll Be Three Less Textbooks...

Teaching West Civ for the first time this year.

Today, convinced my two West Civ teaching colleagues to dump the CD-Rom textbook and instead use the resources at BBC History Online and the Met's Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History as the basis for our curriculum.

One of the two checked in with the chair of our department who responded: "Sure, sounds good."

Ah, the sweet joy of bringing down the publishing industry one textbook at a time.

2 comments:

  1. Two of my colleagues and I are considering doing this for our College Preparatory Physics class next year as a test case. We're tired of having the content that we want to cover dictated to us in a format that is a detriment to student learning. Additionally, the prices of most science and math textbooks are ridiculously high.

    Our initial plan is to create a wiki that the three of us will use to collaboratively build the curriculum from our own resources as well as those found around the web. Thanks for providing further inspiration for our "mad plan". I suspect we will encounter some resistance.

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  2. Brian,
    Physics is what I teach as well, and my trouble has been not wanting to reinvent the wheel and at the same time targeting an algebra based class. Most good resources out there are either aimed at the common person (no math) or calculus based. It is great that you have other to share in the writing duties, but I have yet to find a text (and a few problem sets) that match my needs. May be I need to get rid of the problems, but that will not serve all my students well.

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