Developing, customizing, and investigating open textbooks in undergraduate science courses

While licensed textbooks are commonly assigned in undergraduate courses, they can be cost prohibitive for students and, in some cases, they may not quite fit the content instructors wish to teach. Open textbooks can help overcome these obstacles. In this session, we’ll hear about two open textbook initiatives at UBC Science. Leah Edelstein-Keshet (Math) will describe a multi-year process that culminated in an open textbook designed for teaching first-year Calculus with applications from Life Sciences (http://www.math.ubc.ca/~keshet/OpenBook.pdf). It is currently used by about 900 students per year at UBC (Math 102/103), as well as at SFU. Georg Rieger and Stefan Reinsberg (Physics and Astronomy) adapted an open textbook for use in Physics 100 and collaborated with Christina Hendricks (Philosophy, CTLT) to investigate its use in their course. In their presentation, they will highlight their diverse interests in open textbooks and how their collaboration was successful in expanding their knowledge about students’ perceptions about course materials, particularly open textbooks, and course organization. They will present the COUP framework that structured their analysis as well as results from their surveys and focus groups.