What are Open Textbooks?
From Affordable Learning Georgia's website:
"Open textbooks are like any other textbook, except that a dedicated team of authors, instructional designers, and/or organizations have made them available for free and have given users the power to adapt them for their students and pedagogy.
Open textbooks are usually licensed under Creative Commons licenses, which give permissions to all open textbook users to revise, remix, redistribute, retain, and reuse them. Although new commercial programs for instant access to textbooks exist, such as inclusive access programs, only open textbooks allow adaptation and remixing, and they do so at no cost to students.."
NOTE: For more information on Open Educational Resource and Open Textbooks, see Affordable Learning Georgia's excellent website on using and implementing OER in the college classroom.
Selecting Textbooks
Adopting, modifying, or creating an open textbook for your course is a big decision, requiring you to evaluate new resources often on your own. When you begin evaluating open textbooks, use the following criteria:
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Clarity, Comprehensibility, and Readability
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Is the content, including any instructions, exercises, or supplemental material, clear and comprehensible to students?
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Is the content well-categorized in terms of logic, sequencing, and flow?
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Is the content consistent with its language and key terms?
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Content Accuracy and Technical Accuracy
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Is the content accurate based on both your expert knowledge and through external sources?
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Are there any factual, grammatical, or typographical errors?
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Is the interface easy to navigate? Are there broken links or obsolete formats?
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Adaptability and Modularity
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Is the resource in a file format which allows for adaptations, modifications, rearrangements, and updates?
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Is the resource easily divided into modules, or sections, which can then be used or rearranged out of their original order?
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Is the content licensed in a way which allows for adaptations and modifications?
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Appropriateness
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Is the content presented at a reading level appropriate for higher education students?
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How is the content useful for instructors or students?
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Is the content itself appropriate for higher education?
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Accessibility
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Is the content accessible to students with disabilities through the compatibility of third-party reading applications?
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If you are using Web resources, does each image have alternate text that can be read?
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Do videos have accurate closed-captioning?
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Are students able to access the materials in a quick, non-restrictive manner?
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Supplementary Resources
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Does the OER contain any supplementary materials, such as homework resources, study guides, tutorials, or assessments?
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Have you reviewed these supplementary resources in the same manner as the original OER?
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Repositories for Open Educational Resources & Open Textbooks
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BCcampus OpenEd
- BCcampus OpenEd collects textbooks for a variety of subjects. It is an especially good repository to use because there are reviews for the texts, and labels for texts that have been adopted and have been peer-reviewed.
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Lumen Learning (Boundless)
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Note: Lumen Learning includes free and low-cost OER course materials. Boundless textbooks specifically are freely available.
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This textbook selection includes course packages that include reading material, PowerPoints, assessment, and more. They are free to access.
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GALILEO Open Learning Materials
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This repository has all of the Affordable Learning Georgia completed Textbook Transformation Projects. All of these materials are available for free and were authored by USG faculty. It is searchable by course code, course title, or discipline. There are open textbooks available as well as ancillary material. Below is a selection of available textbooks.
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MERLOT
- This comprehensive, searchable repository (one of the first of its kind!) includes open resources that are peer-reviewed and user rated open textbooks and supplementary materials from a variety of sources including submissions from professors from colleges all over the world as well as companies such as OpenStax, OpenSUNY, and more.
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Milne Open Textbooks (KnightScholar)
- Open SUNY's repository has textbooks as well as interactive simulations, audiobooks, videos and more supplementary materials to complement the textbooks.
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OpenStax College & OpenStax CNX (Connexions)
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These books are peer-reviewed, completely free as an e-book or $50 for a print copy. Some textbooks are optimized to partner with low-cost technology projects such as Carnegie Learning, Cengage, eMath, WebAssign, and more.
Most textbooks also include Instructor Resources such as answer guides, tests, PowerPoint slides, a sample syllabus, and worksheets
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University of Minnesota (UMN) Open Textbook Library
- This repository has lots of reviewers for real feedback from instructors who have implemented the open textbooks collected here.