There are no “textbooks” available for one of the courses I teach as a sessional instructor in the Department Fisheries and Aquaculture at VIU and the resources I use in my classes are up to my discretion. This presents both a burden and an opportunity in the development and delivery of the course and I have embraced open resources as they have become available.  My first run with the course on Larval Rearing and Invertebrate Aquaculture was in 2000 when the internet didn’t provide much content on the subject so I had to cobble content information from traditional sources like books and journals, grey literature like government documents, and then filled out the course from what I knew and learned from my contacts in science and industry. I was thrilled in 2004 when the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) published the online and downloadable document Hatchery Culture of Bivalves: A Practical Manual, co-authored by Neil Bourne a long-time bivalve biologist at the Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo, Neil Bourne, which is openly accessible but has the following restrictions,
“All rights reserved. Reproduction and dissemination of material in this information product for educational or other non-commercial purposes are authorized without any prior written permission from the copyright holders provided the source is fully acknowledged. Reproduction of material in this information product for resale or other commercial purposes is prohibited without written permission of the copyright holders.”

While the copyright rules for FAO publications have some restrictions those of UNESCO, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization are fully Open Access,
“Open Access means free access to scientific information and unrestricted use of electronic data for everyone. With Open Access, expensive prices and copyrights will no longer be obstacles to the dissemination of knowledge. Everyone is free to add information, modify contents, translate texts into other languages, and disseminate an entire electronic publication. – See more at: http://en.unesco.org/open-access/#sthash.yz5MrrY0.dpuf”

In his chapter Trends in Open Education, Tony Bates (2015) discusses the concept of openness as it relates to learning, educational resources (OER), textbooks, research and data.  It is exciting to see that Canada has embraced the concept of openness in many ways including open universities like Athabasca University and Téluq, the B.C. open textbook project, and BC Data Catalogue. I am particularly looking forward to exploring the 3625 datasets currently available in the BC Data catalogue to find ones I may develop learning activities around, in which students access, use, and possibly contribute to the data.
 
I’m very interested in the quality of the available open educational resources and their potential to expand the learning opportunities of students, so I was curious about what the Open Educational Resources Library from Educause had to show.  The first website to catch my interest was Connexions, or OpenStax College from Rice University. I took a look at a biology “textbook” available online and downloadable for free, and am impressed by the quality of the photos and diagrams, the content and the activities and review exercises.  It is certainly of comparable quality to the traditional printed textbooks available and has the advantage of adaptability since it is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 license, which means the user is free to share and adapt the material as long as proper attribution is stated. While I personally still prefer to read and study from printed material, as many of my students have also stated, the financial benefits awarded by free textbooks and the potential for editing and adapting them for a course makes for a very attractive resource. The move by the government of BC to provide flexible and affordable access to licensed textbooks in higher education is truly commendable if the materials are of high quality and kept up to date. The resources of OpenStax College are mentioned as possibilities for adoption. The adherence to the five Rs of education as defined by David Wiley, to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute the material is also encouraging and in future I’ll be looking at how open these resources really are in terms of ease of editing.