Abstract
Since the launch of the BC Open Textbook Project in 2012, the adoption of open textbooks has steadily grown within public post-secondary institutions in British Columbia, Canada. An analysis of adoption records over a five-year period reveals that open textbooks have been adopted across all types of institutions, including research universities, teaching universities, colleges, and institutes, and across a diverse set of disciplines, with the largest numbers in the sciences and social sciences. In this report we identify, describe, and illustrate eight distinct patterns of open textbook adoption. These are: stealth adoption, adoption by infection, committee adoption, sanctioned exceptional adoption, course developer adoption, infection by inter-institutional carrier, creation and adoption, and lone adoption. While these patterns are not intended to be exhaustive, we hope that identifying these patterns provides a useful framework for campus leaders to (a) understand how adoptions occur in their own contexts, (b) identify ways to support further adoptions, (c) recognize that there are multiple ways, and no single path, to supporting the adoption of educational innovations at their institutions, and (d) foster the embrace of wider open educational practices.
Highlights
The high cost of commercial textbooks has strengthened the existing relationship between socioeconomic status and academic achievement (Sirin, 2005), with a majority of post-secondary students in British Columbia not purchasing at least one of their required textbooks due to cost (Jhangiani & Jhangiani, 2017; Hendricks, Reinsberg, & Rieger, 2017)
This, together with a desire on the part of faculty for greater pedagogical flexibility has led to a rapid growth in the creation, adaptation, and adoption of open textbooks, a type of open educational resource (OER) that is free for users to reuse, revise, remix, retain, and redistribute (Wiley, Bliss, & McEwen, 2014)
Where individual instructors who wish to adopt OER are constrained by the collective will of a textbook selection committee, a sanctioned exceptional adoption might be offered as a strategy
Summary
The high cost of commercial textbooks has strengthened the existing relationship between socioeconomic status and academic achievement (Sirin, 2005), with a majority of post-secondary students in British Columbia not purchasing at least one of their required textbooks due to cost (Jhangiani & Jhangiani, 2017; Hendricks, Reinsberg, & Rieger, 2017). As of December 2017, these textbooks have been adopted by over 400 faculty across 42 BC institutions in more than 1650 course sections, with an estimated total savings to students of over $5.5 million (BCcampus, 2017). In addition to these significant cost savings, BC students assigned OER have been shown to perform the same as or better than those assigned commercial textbooks (Hendricks et al, 2017; Jhangiani, Dastur, LeGrand, & Penner, in press), a consistent finding in the research literature (Hilton, 2016)
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