In Favor of Adopting Open Textbooks

Legislators, school administrators, and other policy makers have encouraged and/or mandated the use of open source textbooks to ease the financial burden on students. An obvious counter-argument is that you get what you pay for.

There is no doubt that major publishing companies provide more faculty-pleasing bells and whistles than are found with open source textbooks. On the other hand, many students do not obtain their textbooks until after classes begin, often going days or weeks without required materials.  The benefits of the commercial textbook diminish or disappear entirely for students who do not have their textbooks, and this problem is exacerbated when students take more classes on-line and visit the campus bookstore less often.

Meanwhile, the faculty involved with the PreTeXt project (https://pretextbook.org/) are working to create textbooks superior to commercial textbooks.

The first obvious advantage is that the instructor can provide a link to the html version of the textbook before class begins. Next, unlike a pdf with fixed line breaks that may force the reader to scroll left and right, the html version is designed to be readable not only on computer screens but also on the small displays of mobile devices.

The PreTeXt project is a partner with the American Institute of Mathematics (https://aimath.org/) in the NSF-funded UTMOST Project (https://utmost.aimath.org/), seeking “to understand how students and faculty actually use textbooks in undergraduate mathematics courses and to use that understanding to produce textbooks that are more effective in promoting student learning.”

Two relatively mature textbooks authored in PreTeXt are Active Calculus (Matt Boelkins) and ORCCA (Open Resources for Community College Algebra, Ann Cary, Alex Jordan et al.). Both have associated videos corresponding to each lesson, and both have homework sets coded in the open source WeBWorK online homework system. (For schools that cannot host the free WeBWorK system themselves, there are options such as xyzhomework and Edfinity that offer low-cost alternatives to the publisher sponsored homework systems.)

Some of the textbooks written in PreTeXt provide embedded interactive exercises that the student answers in the book and gets immediate feedback. And via a collaboration with Runestone Academy (https://runestone.academy/), it is even possible to set up a course so that Runestone Academy will record the responses students make in the textbook without requiring the student to log into a homework system.

One talking point about open source textbooks is that faculty have the option of taking the parts they like, changing parts they dislike, and/or adding components they feel are missing, then publish their own versions. That does not happen very frequently in practice, but interested users can work with the textbook authors to create ancillaries to share with the community.