9 Case Study: Principles of Microeconomics
Maxwell Nicholson’s interest in open textbooks started as a student leader at the University of Victoria Students’ Society.
He ran on a platform of open textbooks, and won (when we spoke with him he was just ending his post as director of campaigns and community relations). His involvement in an open textbook was one way of fulfilling a campaign promise to bring free textbooks into use at the university.
After the campaign, Nicholson met with about ten professors in exploratory meetings to find out about the barriers to adoption for open textbooks. These included Dr. Emma Hutchinson, who taught the ECON 103 course that Nicholson (and three of the other candidates) had been longtime lab instructors for.
“It’s not going to go anywhere if the professor’s not onboard, so we were fortunate enough for Dr. Hutchinson to be really excited about it too,” Nicholson says.
Post-election, Nicholson’s first step to operationalize the project was to apply for a $4,800 grant for the project from BC Campus, which served as a granting agency for open textbook projects that could prove a demand. Despite a few bumps along the way, the funds came through for the project.
This open textbook project was different in that rather than being primarily the work of an instructor with funding to write it or a class-assigned project for students, the grant funded lab instructors to do the heavy lifting of compiling the textbook. The professor reviewed it and made the changes they thought necessary from there. This was doable since Nicholson had direct experience with how the instructor taught the class.
Nicholson had assisted the microeconomics class three times and the macroeconomics course once. “I’ve been fortunate to be on the pedagogy side to some extent, obviously nothing compared to professors, but when writing the textbook, that was really really crucial for me to have that lens when I was contributing.”
The textbook started as an adaptation of Timothy Taylor’s open textbook, Principles of Microeconomics,[1] from OpenStax. But in the process of adapting the text, they found there were a lot of components that had to be written.
Ultimately, the textbook comprised around 30 percent material that came from Timothy Taylor’s book and 70 percent new content the lab instructors developed from their notes and the professor’s slide decks.
“The reason this project was most appealing is because she had her slides over here which taught what she wanted [students] to know, and then the publisher’s textbook was completely different,” NIcholson says. “So from the start our goal was really to align those two things.”
Nicholson says the lab instructors thought a lot about how students were going to consume the material, and what components of the course the instructor really wanted to stress.
They hoped to save students the cost of buying a textbook they didn’t really use.
The book was structured into eight topics, then the lab instructors di