Dr. Sean Fitzpatrick and joerdis
Dr. Sean Fitzpatrick is an outspoken advocate for Open Textbooks and his collection of textbook adaptations and creations is proof of this conviction. If you are curious and want to learn more about the 7 open textbooks he has modified, you can visit his his website.
This short conversation from 2016 will tell you more about the intentions behind his efforts and the steps it took to create customisable teaching resources for his courses.
Teaching Centre (TC): How did you first become interested in the topic of Open Educational Resources?
Affordable textbooks, whether open or not, have always been a concern for me since in most of the positions I had at larger universities before, where textbooks are set by committees, I didn’t have much influence in what book was going to be used. This changed when I started teaching in the Math Department at Uleth where we introduced a new Math 1010 bridging course for Calculus basics. First, we looked around for commercial textbooks that were available and there was one that would have worked, but it came at a ridiculously high cost. Knowing that the standard material in the commercial textbooks is also available in many other places made me think that we should try to come up with a customized solution that could work for the course exactly the way we wanted and that also wouldn’t set the students back too much money to enroll. My interest in OER is linked to the fact that they pair affordability for the students with the freedom for an instructor to create something that custom-fits the course in question.
TC: What are the advantages of an open textbook over a traditional textbook?
With an open textbook, you are free to pick and choose what you want. In my case of the aforementioned bridging Calculus course Math 1010, even though there wasn’t a single book that did everything, I found a pair of books – the APEX Calculus by Hartman et al and the Open Precalculus materials by Stitz and Zeager that had everything I needed. I first choose the chapters I needed from each book, assembled them in the order that fit my course after and finally added my own portion, before I turned it into a course pack. The advantage with adopted OER materials is that you don’t have to wait for a new edition to come out before mistakes can be corrected or more materials can be added because as soon as you find something that isn’t up to your standards, you can just go on to your computer, pull up the file and make the change immediately. I would like to emphasize that the book may not be perfect the first time you use it, but the open nature of the text means that every time you teach from the book, you can find things to improve, and gradually the book will get better and converge towards an ideal text.
TC: Can you explain what was involved in the modification of the OER materials you are using in your courses now?
The amount of time and effort depends on how picky you want to be as far as the produc