Open Textbooks

• Make it your own! Open textbook content is almost always presented in a way that makes it easy to edit, adapt and restructure. Bring the content into your favourite word processor or document layout software and start working with it.
• Give the content a geographically relevant focus. An excellent first step in adapting any open textbook is to provide a geographic focus that suits local needs.
• Provide format options. Open textbooks offer a huge advantage over traditional publisher supplied textbooks when they are available in many format options. Work with your library to offer your students a range of formats (e.g. epub, mobi, pdf and html). Publisher supplied e-textbooks typically come in a format that serves the digital rights management needs of the publisher, with little regard for student accessibility.
• Use your course management system. If you are stumped on how to deliver your open textbook, consider making it available through the course management system available at most institutions.
• Give back. If you have found useful texts, go back to the site that you found them on and provide a helpful review. Others need to know what is good and not so good about these resources.

Remember, when considering an open textbook for your course,  there are only 3 possible outcomes:

• Lower costs and poorer learning outcomes
• Lower costs and similar learning outcomes
• Lower costs and better learning outcomes

Open textbooks always cost less that a traditional published textbook. When lower costs are combined with similar or better outcomes, there is a net benefit to the student. These net benefits to students will occur twice as often for open textbooks than a traditional fee based text.

This material is based on original writing by David Wiley, which was published freely under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license at:http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/3743