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Open Textbooks For Teaching

How to find, adapt, or author open licenced textbooks for use in teaching

Adopting Open Textbooks

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Finding Open Textbooks by Institute

Browse a selection of Open Textbooks by your Institute's disciplines and an associated list of links to Open repositories.

As always, contact your Liaison Librarian for assistance in finding suitable Open Textbooks for your needs.

Featured titles

The links in the accordion below will take you to collections that contain resources relevant to Education, Humanities & the Arts topics.
  • Audio books & Poetry
    This library of free audio books and poetry features digital recordings and MP3's from the Naropa Poetics Audio Archive, LibriVox, Project Gutenberg, Maria Lectrix, and Internet Archive users
  • BCCampus OpenEd
    Large collection of open textbooks on a wide range of subjects and specialities, more than a third of which have been peer-reviewed. The collection features textbooks for higher education courses and vocational education courses.
  • DOAB
    The Directory of Open Access Books provides access to more than 33,000 peer-reviewed books from more than 400 publishers. Includes textbooks, with a large number of education titles.
  • HathiTrust
    HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitised from libraries around the world
  • MITOpenCourseWare
    MIT OpenCourseWare is a free and open collection of material from thousands of MIT courses, covering the entire MIT curriculum.
  • OAPEN
    Freely available academic books, mainly in the humanities and social sciences.
  • OER Commons - Art
    Curated collection of art history, graphic arts, performing arts and visual arts.
  • OER Commons - Social science
    Resources relevant to courses with the social sciences available on OER Commons.
  • Open Textbook Library
    Curated collection of high-quality peer-reviewed textbooks and resources for education courses, including Australian resources.
  • Project Gutenberg Australia
    Collection of more than 4000 titles including classic Australian literature.
  • Project MUSE
    Collection of high-quality books and journals in the humanities and social sciences from more than 200 university presses.

 

Featured titles

The links below will take you to collections that contain resources relevant to Nursing, Psychology and Sport Science.

Featured titles

The links below will take you to collections that contain resources relevant to Engineering, IT and Physical Sciences. Further resources may be found in the links provided in the Open textbooks tab.

Evaluating Open Textbooks

As with any resource, Open Textbooks and OERs should be evaluated to assess their credibility and the quality of the material. With so many resources available online the task of choosing can be overwhelming.

While the CRAAP Test is a useful mnemonic for students to evaluate their resources, a more appropriate set of criteria for teaching staff is BASIC.

Find out more about Selecting Teaching Resources from this linked guide.

The following checklist provides some questions to consider when choosing resources. 

  Yes No

Accuracy

  • Is the information accurate? Are there major content errors or omissions?
  • Are  there spelling errors or typos?
    

Relevance

  • Does the information directly address one or more of the unit learning outcomes?
    

Production quality

  • Is the information clear and understandable?
  • Is the layout and interface easy to navigate?
  • Do the design features enhance learning?
  • For audio or video resources, is the sound quality high?
    

Accessibility

  • Is the resource available in alternative formats? (e.g. docx?)
  • For audio or video resources, is there a transcript or subtitles?
    

Interactivity

  • Does the resource encourage active learning and class participation?
  • Are there opportunities for students to test their understanding of the material (e.g. a video with embedded questions?)
    

Licensing

  • Does the licence allow for educational reuse of the materials?
  • Does the licence allow modifications or adaptations of the materials?
    

Faculty Guide for Evaluating Open Education Resources by BCOER Librarians CC-BY 4.0

Are you interested in to know more or get involved with OER/ Open associations?
These links will take you to Australian and global interest groups.
  • Australasian Open Access Strategy Group (AOASG)
    • AOASG advocates to make Australian research open and FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable).
  • Australasian Open Educational Practice Special Interest Group (OEPSIG)
    • OEPSIG is a practitioner-facilitated community designed to bring open educators (primarily those in higher education) together to explore issues of common interest, collaborate on shared projects, undertake research, and advocate for the place of OEP in national learning and teaching discussions, strategy and policy.
  • Open Education Global (OE Global)
    • OE Global is a member-based, non-profit organisation supporting the development and use of open education around the world. Its focus is on new forms of open education enabled by digital technology, the Internet, and cultures of sharing.
  • OpenEducation Special Interest Group (OpenEd SIG)
    • Established in 2012, OpenEd SIG aims to support, develop, sustain and influence policy in open education. It focuses on connecting open communities of practice through webinars, social media and other related activities.
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