I'm planning on adopting an OER book next Fall. It's CC BY and two of my colleagues are going to add more information on specific topics to the book. The book doesn't come with PowerPoints or a test bank. So, I'm applying for a grant from my University to produce this.

This course is taken by about 500 students a year. It is taught mostly by adjunct faculty. I think they will welcome the change. It must be very liberating to say, "Here is the link to the book. It's free. You can print it or read it electronically. Chapter 1 is due next week."

I didn't feel comfortable changing the book even though it was CC BY. I emailed the author and he was super supportive. I learned how to credit his work appropriately the previous week. I can't wait to get started.

That's great! Can you let us know what book it is? Subject area?

Observations from of these 2 examples: the Professors felt uncomfortable with a student spending money for a published textbook and they found an available open textbook they felt capable of revising to meet their own expectations.

Noted that the COOLforED website includes search capabilities which would be very helpful if existing CC content was embedded with necessary metadata -- 1. Enter key words below to search [-] for Free eTextbooks _ 2. Enter the ISBN of a book below to find related FREE eTextbooks.

In which ways does your Institution lower the barrier to education for financially-at-risk Students?

One of the big concerns that keeps coming up in our conversations is ADA compliance as we want to make sure that anything we create is accessible from day 1 rather than trying to "fix" something later.

Hi Jennifer- this is extremely timely as I just finished an Accessibility focus group yesterday with 5 visually impaired students. We are working with the students to have them user test our open textbooks for accessibility and they have some great recommendations. We are compiling all of this into a resource- the Accessibility Toolkit which will be made available at the end of February.

As an Instructional designer, my job is to sell others on OER. As a part time faculty member I have never adopted a book for my Art History course ... I have always used web resources to provide the content. I just couldn't see asking my students to pay $200 for a book they will not need after my course ends.

I hear you about having a hard time requiring students to pay $$$. I just had two students this week tell me that they may drop my course because they can't come up with the funds to cover all of their textbooks.

I would be as ready / willing to adopt an open textbook as I would to buy one off the shelf. I need to find the pockets of least resistance in my organisation to help push this forward.

I have not covered the full scope of any text book I have used in my courses and for this reason I would be excited to adopt OTBs for customization purposes. I would definitely love to see my students save money as well. Any downside to presentation quality can be compensated for by an instructor I should think through use of OERs, lesson planning and support materials. I also wish to develop some OERs over the short term.

At UCW we have adopted two of the open textbooks from the BC site, the intro psychology and the intro sociology texts. I'm in discussion with one of the faculty about adopting open resources for the always troublesome English 100 (the textbook & content fight over that course has gone on for years).

I also wrote two upper level History courses for University of the Fraser Valley using open resources to the maximum degree I could, including extensive use of an on-line academic encyclopedia, GAMEO. In both courses I would have gone to 100% electronic resources, but I could not because the best materials for specific topics were not available electronically. The GAMEO materials were fascinating since the encyclopedia is hyperlinked so students could easily follow extended threads on the basis of interest.

I think the OER approach allows completely new ways of thinking about course content that allows us to move toward better resources and teaching strategies.

I have been following Tony Bates' Blog as he has been writing his book, "Teaching in a Digital Age", over the past year. In the context of this workshop discussion, I thought that Tony's initial blogs posts, where he frames his vision, would be relevant to the group.

Tony Bates: My vision for an open textbook _ http://www.tonybates.ca/201... __ AND __ The fantastic view of the Mediterranean from his window, where Tony began writing Chapter 1 _ http://www.tonybates.ca/201...

I have already found an open textbook I would like to adopt and modify for one of my English composition courses. I would like to have it in place for next fall (2015). The only barrier I'm concerned about is our campus textbook adoption process.

In terms of the barriers is this because of a department specific way in which textbooks are adopted? For example, I know that in some institutions the adoption of a textbook in a course has to be pre-approved by the department as a whole.

Yes, I have to request a textbook adoption through our curriculum committee which includes getting approval of my department. However, to be honest it is often the case that no one really looks too closely at this type of request as long as it doesn't remove the book they want to use :-)

I feel that I am ready to adopt an open textbook.But before I can adopt open texts in my course, I would need to invest some major time in revising an open text to add content that I feel is necessary (if not already included). I also feel that having other faculty members in my department to discuss and bounce ideas of would be extremely helpful in to move the process of adopting an open textbook along. It would also be very helpful to hear from someone in the Communication Studies world who has already adopted open textbooks in their courses.

The only hesitancy that I have with adopting an open text is losing a technology platform such as McGraw Hill's Connect that is truly a great learning resource and supplement for students.

Excellent question re: communication instructors. I have just put out the call on twitter- will see if we get some responses.

That is a great point regarding the loss of technological support and test banks. My greatest hesitation in pursuing an open text is the fear of losing thousands of practice and test problems. For a technical study like accounting, effective learning is predicated on student repitition. Walking away from a publisher also means losing access to these resources.

I feel that I am also ready to adopt an open textbook. My challenge is finding a discipline specific resource - nursing and the many components that fall within this. Having said that - basic human and anatomy and communication texts are applicable to many of the health sciences - so I will start with these

I think I would be ready to adopt an open textbook if I could find a suitable text for my college study skills course. There are many textbooks on college study skills but at this point, I do not know of any that are open textbooks. I think there is a definite time commitment involved in order to do the appropriate research to find a suitable book. I like the idea of adopting a text that I can revise to fit my specific course. And again this would require time. So at this point, I am at the research stage.