Open Educational Resources/ Textbooks

Textbook costs for students are rising quickly. Jhangiani & Jhangiani (2017) found that the majority of students in BC had at some point chosen not to buy a required textbook based on cost, and over a quarter of students surveyed had made course selections or withdrawals based on textbook costs. Making zero and low textbook cost courses available to students increases educational access and equity.

StudentPIRGS has a number of tips for Faculty looking to consider affordable textbooks. You can find links to search for Open Textbooks and Open Monographs below, or your can design your own Course Pack. Remember to follow the UWinnipeg Fair Dealing Guidelines when designing your course pack, or send your reading to the Syllabus Service for full service assistance.

These are sites that search across many different databases. Some are broad, general OER search sites, so you may want to limit your search in the search options to just "textbooks".

A number of Universities, regional governments, and research funders have encouraged projects to develop free and open textbooks. Some offer low-cost print on demand services. The sites listed have academic peer review processes.

Open Books/ Open Monographs may be relevant as core or supplementary textbooks, even if they are not structured like an introductory textbook. All sources here are peer reviewed and published by scholarly publishers.

While many STEM textbooks are available through the meta searches and textbook projects listed above, they are not as common in Open Monographs. Some Open Science resources that may be useful as textbook supplements or replacements are found below.