The AMS is currently pushing for more open textbooks.
In 2012, the government announced that the BC Ministry of Advanced Education would fund the B.C. open textbook project. The project intends to give students access to openly licensed educational resources, including textbooks.
“The way they’re set up is, one instructor or a group of them put together a textbook, and they range from basic accounting to advanced biology textbooks, and they’re produced online so they’re available for ongoing improvements,” said Andrew Wilkinson, Minister of Advanced Education.
The “open” refers to open access. Open textbooks can be tailored to particular courses by professors.
“For faculty they are open to be edited in any way, open to be deleted from, integrated with other resources,” said AMS VP Academic Jenna Omassi. “Very simply you can take many open textbooks and kind of copy and paste and make one that fits your course.”
Unlike traditional textbooks under copyright, an open textbook is under a creative commons license that allows for content to be edited but is still attributed to the original author.
According to Omassi, the AMS has already been meeting with campus stakeholders to push the project forward.
“July is when we go full steam ahead and that’s when we start working with the different units that we’ve already kind of been collaborating with, but also that we plan our different campaigns [that] we will be doing in September,” said Omassi.
A student does not necessarily have to pay for an open textbook; if it’s available online, the book wouldn’t have any overhead charges or copyright costs. A professor may choose to print an open textbook and charge “10 or 15 dollars for the printed version just for the actual material…. It’s up to the professor how they want the student to access it but if it were online, it could be completely free,” said Omassi.
According to Wilkinson, the project is already “well underway” with 70 textbooks now open access and 50 more expected to be online in the fall.
Wilkinson noted that it is mostly community colleges and more rural facilities that are currently using open textbooks. He said it is difficult to say why this might be the case and that feedback for the project overall has been, generally, very good.
“Depending on the institution and depending on the company, faculties sometimes do benefit from working with different publishers,” said Omassi, when asked about potential downsides to the project.
“It is also easier for faculty to be using published textbooks, many right now come with problem sets, come with practice exams, come with even mid term and final questions ... so it is a little bit more work for a faculty member to be using an open textbook if they hope to kind of fix it into their own way.”
However, uptake of open textbooks may mean significant savings for students.
“We’re very keen on this project because if we can get the faculty to take it on then we’ll save students a huge amount of money,” said Wilkinson.