British Columbia Government Lends Support to Open Textbooks

[McKiernan, Gerard [LIB]]

*** Spoiler Alert > Possible Duplicate Posting ***

Colleagues/

IMHO > A Major Seismic Event !

/Gerry

The government of British Columbia, Canada’s westernmost province, has announced its support for the creation of open textbooks for the 40 most popular first- and second-year courses in the province’s public post-secondary system. The texts will be available for free online, or at a low cost for printed versions, to approximately 200,000 students. The first texts under this project could be in use at B.C. institutions as early as 2013 for courses in arts, sciences, humanities, and business.

BCcampus, a publicly funded collaborative information technology organization serving the higher-education system, will engage B.C. faculty, institutions, and publishers to implement the open textbook project through an open request for proposals.

David Porter, executive director for BCcampus, explained why CC licenses are crucial to this project. “Open licenses are integral to making textbooks free for students, and flexible enough for instructors to customize the material to suit their courses.”

[more]

Source and Full Text Available Via

[ http://digital-textbooks.blogspot.com/2012/10/british-columbia-government-lends.html ]

BTW: My blog post for my forthcoming working presentation for the _Internet Librarian 2012_ conference titled "OATs: Open Access Textbooks" is now available at

[ http://digital-textbooks.blogspot.com/2012/10/oats-open-access-textbooks-il-2012.html ]

Enjoy !

Gerry McKiernan
Associate Professor
and
Science and Technology Librarian
Iowa State University
152 Parks Library
Ames IA 50011

http://digital-textbooks.blogspot.com/

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2012-10-16
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