Thomas Simpson

Contribute to our textbooks:

Feel free to contact me on my talk page or email me at thomas.simpson@saylor.org

About Saylor

The Saylor Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that offers over 200 free, self-paced, automated courses. While we do not confer degrees, we do offer the knowledge equivalent of thirteen popular disciplines found in traditional brick and mortar institutions.

We hire credentialed professors to create course blueprints and to locate, vet, and organize open educational materials into a structured and intuitive format. Our consulting professors also create original open educational content and link to freely posted copyrighted materials to fill any gaps. Each course culminates with a final exam, and students receiving a passing grade can download a certificate of completion.

We're excited to work with the open education community to help pave the way for students to obtain a quality education at no cost!

Saylor's Collaborative Textbook Project on Wikibooks

One of the biggest obstacles we encounter here at Saylor is link rot. Although we work to host as many resources as we can on our website, we sometimes link to freely available copyrighted material until we can locate resources that we can host on Saylor.org. Every day we find new links in our courses that have gone dead, and we must slowly fill in the holes that form with each dead link. This is admittedly an unsustainable system, which is why we are continuously looking for new ways to develop sustainable and openly licensed content. Our newest plan to help fight reliance on third party links and create original educational material available to everyone is to harness the large Wikipedia and Open Education community through our collaborative textbook project on Wikibooks.

To begin, we have uploaded onto the Wikibooks server the course outlines for five of our courses:

CS107, HIST101, ENGL001, POLSC221, and BIO301.

Our hope is that our fellow Wikibookians and educators will fill in information where they can and, together, we can create quality educational materials that align in a one-to-one fashion with courses. In addition to text-based information, we are in need of openly licensed images that are relevant to specific entries. These will help to facilitate the learning process for anyone going through our courses.

Because our course outlines can double as textbook outlines, our Saylor Wikibooks Project is an opportunity to create open textbooks that are openly available to the public online and through our courses, and developed with the expertise of the larger academic community. Material created on the Wikibooks pages will be transferred over and hosted directly on our website.

This project is your opportunity to create a textbook that will be openly available to the public online and developed with the expertise of the larger academic community. Collaborate with your peers and members of the academic community from around the world, share your expertise with those students who would not otherwise be able to afford educational materials, and have your material published on our website at saylor.org.