Sincere thanks to everyone who took the time last week to offer up their ideas on their favourite Open Textbook example. You can see all the submissions to the Google form so far.
In conversation with some esteemed peers this week, though, it became clear that there are multiple ways to approach this issue, not just ‘what are the best open textbooks’ but also ‘in which courses would a quality open textbook have the biggest impact?’
So for folks here in BC – what course(s) in your institution would an open textbook have the biggest impact on? This might be the highest enrollment course, meaning savings for the largest number of people, but it might also be the course with an inordinately expensive text, or one with both an expesnive text and room for quality improvements. Please let me know in the comments below. We’ll definitely be looking into this same issue at the system-wide level in BC, but I am interested to hear from specific people/institutions where they think the highest impact might be. – SWL
ABE textbooks come to mind. The textbooks may not be inordinately expensive by some standards but they sure are expensive for most learners who sign up for upgrading courses. I talked about the possibility of collaborating for the development of an open textbook for ABE math with our ABE folks the other day. They reminded me that ‘we tried this once’ many years ago & the result was very disappointing so we may have a bit of a job to educate people about value, quality, choice & other good things that they want to see in a textbook.