BC Open Textbook Summit 2017

Textbooks are vital to many approaches to curriculum development, but building one requires creating a significant amount of content. This can be time consuming to write, expensive to acquire externally, or both.

However, textbooks don't necessarily always need to be planned and written from the ground up. Sometimes it may be appropriate to take advantage of existing openly licensed content that can be repurposed to serve as textbooks.

This presentation will consider Wikipedia as an underappreciated treasure trove of such freely reusable learning objects, and demonstrate how its Book Creator tool be used by open educational resources developers, whether in cooperation to increase the number of textbooks generally available to all, or to create on a case by case basis for specific needs that arise.

Steve Foerster is President of New World University. With two decades of expertise in technology, management, and education, Mr Foerster is dedicated to building educational ecosystems that maximise access to higher education for underserved populations.

Vincent Kizza is Executive Director of the Free Curricula Centre at New World University. A trained mathematician and computer scientist, Prof Kizza has been active in the open education movement for a decade, promoting education as a tool for economic development both in Uganda and throughout the world.