The Ideal Textbook
Does Not Exist
Takashi Sato
Dept. of Physics
Presented at Open Textbook Summit
Vancouver, April 16, 2014

Status: 2012
• Always shared educational resources
• Didn’t know they were called “OER”
• Sharing wasn’t always well organized
• There are lots of OER
• not many are well developed into textbook form.
• Many OER have author’s style built in
• they don’t always work for others
*OER – Open Educational Resources

How I got started/involved with
Opentextbooks
• Exposed to a small selection of physics books (Feb 2013)
• One stood out, free does not mean cheap
• Adopt as pilot* (Sept 2013)
• Learned to adapt (Nov 2013)
• mostly by deleting chapters and sections
• Print-on-demand custom edition (Dec 2013)
• Happy – students, instructor, colleagues…
*It was never our intent that students should have to pay ~$200 for each book

Original Adapted for KPU PHYS 1100
Urone, Hinrichs, Dirks & Sharma
College Physics, Openstax College

Purpose of a Textbook
(faculty perspective)
All of us could be textbook authors
but
many of us choose to dedicate our teaching efforts in other ways.

In an Ideal World….
• I pick a textbook off the shelf
• It matches the course content and my teaching style
• I use it, students use it
• Done!
• Money & payment are minor afterthoughts
All the educational resources pre-existed as a package (the
textbook) and I didn’t have to create or assemble them.
In the real world, these idealizations are challenged from many directions

The Perfect Book Does Not Exist
• We can keep searching for the perfect book, or
• We can write our own, or
• We can accept and embrace what exists, and
• We can produce supplements
Edition changes are annoying and require time & effort on my part

Status Today
• With OER, we can make edits
• closer match to my course’s needs
• ebooks – reasonable to ask students to bring to class
• I control the revisions/editions

Conclusion
• I can have a book that serves the course and student needs
more closely than I would have traditionally
• but without writing my own book from scratch
• The ultimate point is not to spend time at it

Check out “my” textbook at
http://www.kpu.ca/physics/sato/PHYS1100