Mar 23, 2014 05:05 PM EDT By Jaleesa Baulkman, UniversityHerald Reporter

A pilot program being implemented this semester at the University of Maryland may help students save a significant amount of money, WTOP News reported.

A student on average can spend $1,200 a year on books, but the University of Maryland is testing a new free textbook program that might cut costs for books to virtually nothing. The program is the latest experiment in changing the way students in Maryland and across the nation are taught.

As part of the program, professors will assign "open-source textbooks" which are made up of materials gathered from various sources and are not protected by copyright, the Baltimore Sun reported. The open source books are designed to be interactive with plenty of links to other free source material and multimedia elements. With this tool, professors can essentially avoid assigning expensive textbooks that can run hundreds of dollars each.

Members of the University System of Maryland told The Baltimore Sun that the pilot program is saving 1,100 students a combined $130,000.

The program, which is still in the pilot stage, is being offered in several schools in the University System of Maryland, including the University of Maryland. If it is received well, it could be an option for all Maryland's higher education students in 2015.

This tool is the latest in a shift on the nation's campuses toward digital learning.

Other schools, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the California State University system and the Washington State college system, have built libraries of free online course materials in recent years.

Though they have been around for several years, they still face challenges and have not caught on broadly, the Baltimore Sun reported.

"I don't know if it's transforming higher ed yet," Craig R. Vasey, a member of the American Association of University Professors who uses open-source materials in his logic class at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia, told the Baltimore Sun. "I think the textbook publishing business is still doing very, very well."

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