2010 promises to be the year of the Open Textbook here in BC as we turn our attention to helping existing open textbooks get adopted by institutions in our province, help our system partners get involved in existing projects and potentially start new ones.
As part of this, I am really interested in hearing about the best examples already out there of Open Textbooks. If you know of a great example, can you take 2 minutes and let us know via this google form?I promise all results wil be shared.
I know the avant garde of ed tech will gripe loudly about the content-centric nature of this request, and while I don’t philosophically disagree, given existing practices in institutions, Open Textbooks represent a near term all-round win (well, except for maybe the publishers, ahem) that we need to help entrench the philosophy of openness and sharing in our public institutions. – SWL
Hi Scott
well I for one am not griping about the ‘content-centric’ nature of this request. Let’s face it, organizing your course around a textbook is still the most common way to do most curriculum development as far as I know. I wish I had an open textbook fav that I could share with you but unfortunately we don’t have anybody here at COTR (yet) using open textbooks that I am aware of. Faculty are concerned about choosing a textbook that is generally accepted by the discipline or (perhaps more influentially) by other members of their articulation committees. Once we get the larger receiving institutions to try open textbook options I think the rest of the system will follow along.
Great comment Gina, and very much aligned with our thinking (and also why I’m casting around for the “best” example that exists, because as I belatedly came to understand through recent conversations with Brian Lamb, *adopting* an existing quality textbook seems like a far more viable way to get the idea into an institution than creating one ex nihilo. Will definitely keep you posted as things develop. Cheers, Scott
Tbere are so many outstanding open textbooks that it is hard to choose. I nominated one on the google doc. There are also a few open textbooks that need work; fortunately open licensing makes that easy. We list more than 400 open textbooks on the College Open Textbooks website. Our peer reviewers have examined about 70 of these. Those found to be of high quality are shown in the reviews section of the website.
Jacky, thanks for this – I did indeed find your review site after I posted this and am planning a follow up post that will include it as well as other sources I’ve found that help in the search for quality resources. Cheers Scott