Open Textbook Initiative in B.C.

Last month, the B.C. government released that they will be developing open textbooks for 40 post-secondary courses to be used as early as the next school year. This is great news! From the first day of talking to our potential users, we knew that one of the most poignant issue for educators is acquiring the source textbooks which they can share with their students. Over the last couple years, we have witnessed the Open Educational Resources movement gain traction and grow. This means that teachers using Open Educational Resources can forego the complicated process of acquiring the license to share digital copies of the textbooks online and the costs associated with it. The vision of equipping teachers with these resources pairs well with Active Textbook since it could be a great platform for remixing and distributing these resources. ActiveTextbook.com could facilitate courses driven primarily with these resources by lending its course-structured nature for educators to group relevant resources and deliver these to students. We hope and expect great synergy from these movements and we are especially excited for this new development in B.C.!