Posts made by Clint Lalonde

Post a brief introduction to let us all know:

  • Who you are?
  • Why you are interested in open textbooks?
  • Have you ever had a favorite textbook? What made it your favorite?

So, I'l start. I'm Clint Lalonde, Manage of Open Education at BCcampus working on the BC Open Textbook Project. You can find out more about me on my blog.

I do have a favorite textbook, although it wasn't used in school. It was part of a collection from 1976 called Childcraft. Each book had a specific theme, and I can remember there being these transparent overlay's of the human body that each contained a different system of the body. When you added the transaprent overlay, you could build up this model of a human body. And I thought that was pretty well the coolest thing.

You can read a bit more about why these were my favorite "textbooks" here.

That's a good idea, Mike. I think maybe a post spotlighting one of our reviewers and what it takes to do a textbook review for us is a good idea.

And thank you for the note about momentum. Really appreciate hearing that. And again, thansk for having us come out to the BCCAT JAm a few weeks back. I have followed up with a number of faculty who were in attendance and am hearing some good feedback from them, including at least one new adoption that I was unaware of before.

Hi Gina,

Great point re) making reviewed texts easier to find. We are working on a way to indicate in the list of textbooks if it has a BC faculty review or not to make it easier to find the textbooks that have been reviewed, which is important for those who are supporting faculty. It will take some programming on our end, but it is on our to do list. For now, you can find the list of reviewed textbook resources here: http://open.bccampus.ca/forums/topic/list-of-textbooks-with-reviews/

I'll also make the point that it is our hope that ALL resources will have at least one review associated with them, so the problem of only searching for resources that have reviews should lessen as we get more and more reviews. So, this is (hpefully) a temporary inconvenience for the people who only want to see reviewed resources.

As for the display of 10 per page, this is an intentional design to paginate this way to make the interface a bit more useable. Rather than have a long scrolling page of resources, we have paginated the results to make the list more manageable.

Hope that helps!

Clint