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Sue Schmidt, the NANSLO/CHEO project coordinator for WICHE sent along some great links to openly licensed science and biology textbooks from BCcampus. I think the books and the model of peer review they are following could become of particular interest to us here at Humboldt State University.
BCcampus is a publicly funded organization that uses information technology to connect the expertise, programs, and resources of all British Columbia post-secondary institutions under a collaborative service delivery framework. BCcampus is also one of North American Network of Science Labs Online (NANSLO) partners. See www.wiche.edu/nanslo for more information on NANSLO.
For its member institutions, BCcampus has identified a number of open textbooks that align with the top 40 subject areas in British Columbia and placed links to them on their website – http://open.bccampus.ca/. These textbooks have been reviewed by faculty experts in the science disciplines.
As part of the Consortium for Healthcare Education Online (CHEO) initiative funded by a U.S. Department of Labor TAACCCT grant, BCcampus was asked to review and identify several textbooks that could be used for pre-requisite science courses taught in the allied health field. Here are links those textbooks that BCcampus engaged CHEO instructors in reviewing. All were highly rated by these instructors and those it works with in British Columbia.
- Anatomy and Physiology
- Chemistry (adapted version)
- Chemistry (original version)
- College Physics
- Biology
In addition, BCcampus suggested several others that might be useful in allied health:
I will be interested in talking to BCcampus about their system of peer review and how that works with their faculty. Watch this space…
Related articles
- What is open peer review? (editeon.com)
- Open Textbooks: The Billion Dollar Solution (infojustice.org)
- Kwantlen professor pioneers access to free textbooks service that saves students cash (vancouverdesi.com)
- Open Source Textbook Study: Students Save Substantial Sums (currikiblog.wordpress.com)
