I have a conviction that a system driven by greed has forced an entire generation into debt servitude and is well on the way to enslaving another. We must reform our debt-based higher education system, and we must lower costs. A major cost that college students are often forced to pay is astronomically expensive textbooks. The humanitarians among us have banded together in an effort to help solve this problem by making our work available for free (or at the lowest possible cost–nobody will print books for free). This is generally done with Open Educational Resources (OER).
My books are available to students for free as web (HTML) pages. The introductory text is available as a Kindle book for a low price and as paperbacks at a low price.
If you are a professor considering the transition to OER, you may find my observations helpful in making that decision: Some Thoughts on OER and an Odd Matrix Analogy.
My current OER materials are not licensed under a creative commons license. They are licensed under what I call an Open Educational Resource-Quality Master Source (OER-QMS) License. If that sounds like I made it up, that’s because I did. Still, that’s the agreement for using my materials. I think it makes a lot of sense for academics, and I encourage any and all OER authors in the Ivory Tower to have a look and let me know what you think.
My OER library of textbook length is as follows:
Introduction to Criminal Justice
- Criminal Justice: An Overview of the System[Print Avalable]
- Fundamental Cases in Criminal Justice[Print Available]
Finance
Statistics
Research Methods
Law
- Fundamentals of Criminal Law [PARTIAL DRAFT]
- Fundamentals of Procedural Law [DRAFT]
- Fundamentals of Legal Research [Incomplete]
Criminology
- Fundamentals of Criminology [with Dr. Scott D. Bransford, DRAFT]
Policing
- Fundamentals of Policing
- Fixing American Policing
- Guardian Ethics: Bushido for Law Enforcement
- Fundamentals of Criminal Investigations
Finding OER Materials
Several initiatives around the Globe have made OER materials available to the global community of learners. Below are some important organizations that promote OER, Open Education, and provide indexing services that make materials easy to find.
Check out my OER catalog, which lists OER Textbooks by Discipline and highlights important research articles.
Check out my Blog, which primarily consists of OER articles and finance articles.
The Open Education Consortium. The Consortium is an organization of member institutions that support Open Education and Open Educational Resources (OER).
Merlot. The MERLOT system provides access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools led by an international community of educators, learners, and researchers.