Ever heard of open textbooks?
Are you still using commercial textbooks?
Up to the 2017 academic year, the Psychology Foundation module on the Psychology Major Programme of Dublin City University (DCU) used a commercial textbook to compliment the online learning materials provided by the programme team. Life as usual.
In the 2018 academic year a switch was made from this commercial textbook to an open textbook by the Canadian Edition Open Textbook Project: this textbook was selected because it was high quality in terms of content and structure, and was sufficiently detailed to replace the textbook that had been used. This simple choice has brought to zero the textbook cost for the module, eliminating any issues with students access because of cost or lack of access through the institutional library. Also, the success of this practice has opened the door to, and strengthened the case for, the replacement of commercial textbooks with open textbooks in other modules’ reading lists.
Do you want to know how the DCU team led by Dr James Brunton did it? Check out Practice 3.1 in the OpenGame Handbook of Successful Open Teaching Practices.
