Have you opened a textbook lately?

Open access textbooks are becoming increasingly popular, with many universities now requiring that their students have access to open textbooks. There are a few different types of open textbooks, including those that are free to use, and those that are available for a fee. Open textbooks can be helpful for students who want to study without having to pay for books, and they can also be useful for teachers who want to create materials that are accessible to all students.

There are, however, some concerns about whether this trend is sustainable. Some believe that open access textbooks are fads that will eventually go away, while others some professors worry that the trend will not pay off for students.

Open up to open access

Join Danielle S. Apfelbaum, Senior Assistant Librarian, Farmingdale State College and Derek Stadler, Assistant Professor at CUNY’s LaGuardia Community College as they take our TAA Summer Webinar Series participants on “A Crash Course on Open Access” next Thursday, July 16th.

Although open access publishing has been around for years, misconceptions about what “open” is and what it means for authors’ works continue to persist. This session aims to demystify this multifaceted concept.

Open access is now: Good news or bad news?

At the TAA Conference in Philadelphia this past month, I heard many comments about open access. They varied widely from support, to derision, to misunderstanding, to apathy.

First, what is open access? In its purest form, open access is offering or publishing material online, free of cost or barriers with an open license that removes most restrictions on use and reuse. The open access or OA movement has been around twenty plus years with its roots going back much farther than that.

Can I help you in any way? OER

“Hello, thank you for visiting. Can I help you in any way?” If you’ve browsed our TAA website, you’ve likely seen those words in the chat box that appears on the screen. We’re often asked by visitors if we’re “real”. Then those who realize that we are, and that we are there to help, ask questions that you may have as well.

In this series of “Can I help you in any way?” posts, we’ll highlight some of the questions people have asked through the TAA Live Chat feature of our site and the responses we have for those questions. In this post, we’re focused on a question about publishing options in either Open Textbook format or through self-publishing methods.

My writing is an open book

The first time I thought about potentially authoring a textbook was in 2005.  I was teaching as an adjunct at four different colleges and was using a different textbook for each.  Each time I brought the correlating textbook for the correlating College Success class with the correlating handouts, assignments, quizzes, and other materials, it felt like a small victory.  As I started to create my own content, I decided that if I ever was hired full time, I would write my own text.  A few years later, I accepted a full-time tenure track faculty position at Grossmont College in San Diego and two years after that I began writing my first textbook.

The top 9 myths about OER publishing

In a recent blog post, we explored some of the questions authors are asking about open textbooks. In this post we have continued the discussion with several leaders in the open textbook movement to identify some of the common misconceptions associated with open educational resources (OER) publishing.

Our industry leaders include Barbara Illowsky (co-author of one of the first open textbooks, Introductory Statistics), Amy Hofer (Open Oregon Educational Resources), Apurva Ashok and Zoe Wake Hyde (Rebus Foundation), and Nicole Finkbeiner (OpenStax, Rice University).

Below are the top nine myths they have identified, and the facts related to each.