For a number of years now I’ve been an advocate for the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) in teaching and learning. OER are “teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions” (UNESCO). What this means is that OER are not just free of cost to download and use, but also can be revised and remixed because they have a license that grants permission to others to do so (e.g., many OER have a Creative Commons license).
Research shows that quite a number of students in various North American institutions report going without textbooks, or choosing different sections of courses, or taking fewer courses than they’d like because of textbook costs (see, e.g., the literature review in Hendricks, Reinsberg, & Rieger, 2017). Of course, we can lower the cost for learning materials for students by using free resources on the web, or assigning articles from our institution’s library catalogue, but the open licenses on OER allow something more: we can revise them to better fit our own teaching contexts, such as by adding in new material, mixing and matching with other openly licensed resources to create a coherent whole, and more. Support for use of OER is growing in many post-secondary institutions and also in local and national governments: e.g., the U.S. Congress has provided $10 million in grant funding for the creation of open textbooks in the last two years, and the Province of British Columbia recently dedicated over $3 million to OER and open source homework systems.
There are many open textbooks and other OER available for college and university courses, which you can find in places such as the Open Textbook Library, the BCcampus Open Textbook collection, Open Stax, LibreTexts, and OER Commons. But a couple of years ago when I went looking for open textbooks in philosophy, especially for introductory-level courses, there weren’t many at that time (more are now available; see the lists of books in the “philosophy” category on the Open Textbook Library site and the BCcampus Open Textbook collection, as well as the Open Logic Project and textbooks from N.G.E. Far Press).
Finding few such open textbooks, I worked with the Rebus Community to crowdsource one for Introduction to Philosophy courses. The Rebus Community supports the development and sustainment of a community of people working together to create and adapt OER. They provide a wealth of information and tools, such as a guide to creating and publishing open textbooks.
I began by drafting a list of topics for the main sections of a textbook that would be useful for many survey courses in Introduction to Philosophy: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Ethics, Logic, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Science, Social & Political Philosophy. Then I found volunteers to act as editors for each of those parts of the book. The editors created outlines of chapters for their sections that were then peer reviewed, and we began to crowdsource authors to write them.
We have been able to find quite a few people willing to participate in the project so far, and it became apparent that each of the parts of the textbook could just as easily become their own books given how many chapters were being developed. Plus, given that the books are all free and publicly available online, it is quite easy for instructors to mix and match which chapters or whole books they want to use for their courses (rather than dealing with one very large book). They can either link to URLs or download and put chapters or whole books together into a larger, customized collection.
Thus, what was once an idea for a single open textbook for Introduction to Philosophy has become a series of books. Each has its own editor, and each has between 5-10 or so authors. We are soon going to be releasing the first few volumes in the series. They are all going to be available through the Rebus Press collection, which allows for viewing the works online, and also downloading them in multiple formats (including PDF, open document (convertible to Microsoft Word), ebook formats, and Pressbooks & WordPress XML).
We have recently published the Philosophy of Mind book in the series, edited by Heather Salazar. Ethics, Logic, and Philosophy of Religion will be the next to be published (the Ethics book, at least, will certainly be ready for courses that start in January).
If you think you might like to contribute to this project, we are still looking for people to help out (though note that this is a volunteer project; we don’t have any funding, unfortunately, and since the books are available free of cost there won’t be any royalties). Please see our current call for contributions (leave a message there to indicate your interest!).
And of course, we would love for the resources to be used in courses! Each book will have an adoption form where you can let us know if you are using part or all of the book in a course.
If you have any questions or would like to volunteer, please reach out! You can post on our main discussion thread at the Rebus Community, on our volunteer sign up thread, or email me: christina.hendricks@ubc.ca.
Christina Hendricks
Christina Hendricks is a Professor of Teaching in Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, where she is also the Academic Director of the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology. She does research in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, recently focusing on open educational resources and practices in post-secondary contexts.
