Dr. Joy Morris and joerdis
In an interview in the Fall 2017, Dr. Joy Morris told me has always been interested in Open Access, not only for publishing her research, but for disseminating her teaching materials too. What really motivates her besides the academic freedom to create her very own and unique quality teaching materials is the discomfort she feels when she sees herself collecting royalties for publishing a textbook.
Her textbook ‘Combinatorics’ has since been added to the BC Campus Open Textbook Collection.
Teaching Centre (TC): When did you become interested in Open Education?
I have always been interested in affordability of education. I was very lucky that my parents had a good income and good savings to support me through my education without me having to depend on work part-time jobs or student loans, while many of my university friends were not so fortunate. The situation has certainly gotten worse since then. When I was a graduate student, I was on the National Executive of the Canadian Federation of Students, where we were working hard on issues relating to affordable education. I found out early that Mathematics textbooks can be among the worst of the science textbooks for the price relative to what you are getting for it. During my studies that meant I would rarely buy a required text, but would look at the textbook of a friend, just to find out what the homework questions were. Since I started teaching I have always been very careful to fully transcribe problems so that buying the textbook isn’t needed for that. It is of course desirable when students refer to text as supplementary information, but if students feel they’re getting enough info from the lectures then that’s fine too.
In terms of direct efforts of mine to tackle the affordability issue, the first thing we did was to bring back with us a 50-book set of an abstract algebra text from a visit to the University of Wisconsin Stout, which their library had been selling off in favor of a newer edition. This is still one of the standard texts in the field, and we have since found that loaning them to our third-year students who are taking the abstract algebra 3400 course was an appropriate way to deal with the issue of textbook provision. I will still be using the set for that course this fall.
What motivated you to write your own open resources for your courses and to publish them under a CC-NC-SA license?
With regards to the access material that my husband Dave and I have written, it started out from the realization that none of the textbooks available for an introductory logics and proofs course worked well enough for Dave’s very personal way of teaching things. Having always had an interest in Open Access, not just for teaching but for publishing in Open Access journals too, he eventually found an Open Access textbook published with a Creative Commons license that had some good material. After he extended it with his own materials, this has become the standard text fo