This week, we hear from Joel Feldman, Faculty in the Department of Mathematics.
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What motivated you do adopt/adapt/create open educational resources in your work?
In the past decade or so prices for textbooks (and associated material) have, in my opinion, become excessive. So I, and my coauthors, decided to turn our own, extensive, internal lecture notes (created over decades of teaching at UBC) into textbooks to be made available to students for free.
Can you tell us about the open education projects you have been working on?
I and my coauthors have created a series of four textbooks, and accompanying exercise books, that cover the standard four course sequence of Calculus courses that are taught in most universities.
What benefits have you seen from using open educational resources in the classroom?
Our goal is to have high quality material, adapted/adaptable to individual courses, available for free to students and instructors. The feedback that we have received suggests that students very much appreciate this.
What was the biggest challenge you faced and how did you overcome it?
Just the amount of work involved. We are still in the process of overcoming it.
Do you have any advice for other faculty developing OER?
Not really. Just be patient and persistent.
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Thank you, Joel, for taking the time to participate!
