Using open textbooks: how easy is that?

Imagine if instead of having to buy a textbook for their courses, your students could simply download for free the course content as an open book on the web. Also, imagine if during the course they could annotate the book online and propose improvements and modifications, for example in case a paragraph is not clear or an exercise could be improved. Finally, the textbook would improve year after year, thanks to the students’ contributions. As the experience of Prof Iaconelli shows, this is easier than you could think.

You could even integrate your own book with high-quality content already written by other professors, so you could share your textbook with an open license, for the benefit of other colleagues. From a technological point of view, this is as easy as using a word-processor and is doable in any subject, including maths and engineering.

Do you want to know more? Check out Practice 1.1 in the OpenGame Handbook of Successful Open Teaching Practices.