Imagine you are an instructor teaching a first year course in your discipline. You have heard about Open Educational Resources and Open Textbooks, and you are interested in adopted an open textbook to replace the (expensive!) text for your course.

What do you need to consider when adopting a new text? How do you ensure the text meets the needs of your class? What concerns might you have with an open textbook compared to a published textbooks?

For this learning activity, you will respond to the questions above and you will attempt to find and justify a new text for a first year course of your choosing. This can be a topic/course that you’ve taken or one on a topic that you’re interested in.

You will document the process you followed to find and evaluate the text, and conclude by letting me know if you think you’ve succeeded in finding a suitable textbook. Will the textbook require any revisions for your use case?

Here is a repository to get you started: https://open.bccampus.ca/browse-our-collection/find-open-textbooks/ but you’re free to use any repository you’d like.

Make sure to also include a short self-reflection on why you chose this activity, how it aligned with your learning goals, and what you learned through your critical review of the experience.