Textbook Support Resources

Major textbook publishers are finding that they can sell more books by giving away piles of supplementary materials over the Internet. Make more money by giving away a lot of useful stuff—it's called Web economics (or webonomics).  This rapidly growing source of terrific educational  material is freely available to anyone who knows how to use it, and that's where Free-Ed.Net comes into the picture.

Free-Ed.Net is developing a large number of courses and study guides that make use of these textbook support resources. Frankly, they do not work well for teachers and students who unable to adapt to the goals and methods of today's educational paradigm. " Where's the whole textbook? Where's the teacher?" (In other words, "How am I supposed to be spoon-fed what I need to know in order to pass the exams and get a diploma?")  That's old-school education. Today we go online to learn and, more important, to learn how to learn. All we need is some learning objectives, some direction, some basic resources, a good search engine, and an unquenchable desire to learn. Free-Ed.Net supplies all of these things... except your desire to learn how to put things together and come up with a "whole" that is greater than the sum of the parts.

When you open one of our courses or study guides that use textbook support resources, you will find learning objectives, lesson outlines, and lesson summaries among the first assignments. These provide the direction you need.

Then you will find detail items such as vocabulary terms, equations, brief statements of principles, and so on. You are encouraged to plug these details into a Google search box and study the details from a number of different angles. You are strongly encouraged to write your findings and questions in a learning journal. The objective of this phase is to get a perspective on the subject at hand.

Often, the assignments are supplemented with video presentations, online activities (such a virtual biology labs),  PowerPoint presentations, and a host of other multimedia resources. Again, the objective is to expand your understanding and help you get a better perspective on the subjects.

Finally, you will find some online quizzes and exercises. You don't want to rush through the multiple-choice, true/false, and essay questions just to see what kind of score you get.  Scores aren't important at Free-Ed.Net. An honest self-assessment of your achievements with the lesson, however, is vitally important. So use the quizzes and exams as additional sources of learning objectives. If you don't understand a question or don't agree with an answer, it is time to check it out with more research.

Far too many of today's students believe that education consists of slugging their way through a load of busywork and passing some annoying exams. Passing the exams is paramount in that scheme ... learning is incidental.  That sort of thing doesn't work at Free-Ed.Net. People come here to learn. And when they really "learn how to learn," the exams, professional advancement, annual salary, and other life-changing opportunities take care of themselves.

We are recommending that you take advantage of some of the free educational resources that are available on the book publisher's website. Not all portions of a textbook publisher's site are available to the public, however. We will send you only to portions of the site that are availble to the public at no cost.  So when we link you to the lesson objectives or a multiple-choice quiz, for example, that's exactly the work you should do ... nothing else. Free-Ed.Net will never send you to a portion of another site that requires you to buy a product or make a payment. But if you begin exploring the publisher's site on your own, you are bound to come across premium content that is not freely available to the public. So if you don't like that kind of rejection, you should stay with the freatures that your Free-Ed.Net study guide suggests.

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