A tweet by Alec Couros about the BcCampus Open Textbook Project caught my eye the other day as it reminded me of something I had read about in Brian Tomlinson’s introduction to Materials Development in Language Teaching. In the article I had particularly liked the parts about textbook projects (Tomlinson in Tomlinson ed., 2011: 10 &  24/25), i.e. material design collaborations between teachers, curriculum designers, publishers, researchers and other experts. I am not particularly fond of centrally produced, prescriptive textbooks so the idea of a collaborative enterprise of this kind is very appealing and I can certainly see why Tomlinson would call it “productive”. Unfortunately I was unable to find anything more about the projects Tomlinson was involved in. However, I believe the contributions below also have relevance to ELT.

The purpose of the textbook project in British Columbia, Canada, is to make educational resources affordable and accessible to a higher number and a wider range of students. These open educational resources (OERs) are based on the following principles of open education:

1. Retain – i.e. no digital rights management restrictions (DRM), the content is yours to keep, whether you’re the author, instructor or student.
2. Reuse – you are free to use materials in a wide variety of ways without expressly asking permission of the copyright holder.
3. Revise – as an educator, you can adapt, adjust, or modify the content to suit specific purposes and make the materials more relevant to your students. This means making it available in a number of different formats and including source files, where possible.
4. Remix – you or your students can pull together a number of different resources to create something new.
5. Redistribute – you are free to share with others, so they can reuse, remix, improve upon, correct, review or otherwise enjoy your work.

I also came across the ‘Global textbook project: new horizons in textbook marketing’ (Pitt et al, 2009). Here the context of teaching is not ELT but Business Studies. This project was the brainchild of Professor Rick Watson of the University of Gerogia’s Terry College of Business. After failing to source a textbook he deemed appropriate for his graduate class he decided “that the textbook for the course would be written, reviewed, and edited by the course members and ultimately used by the course members” (299/300) using Wiki software to create a Wikibook. The main goal was to create teaching materials that were relevant and free to the student-authors as well as students on subsequent courses. Although the students had to work extremely hard to produce a textbook of a high enough quality to pass on to future classes as well as management of the project being considerable, the end product (maybe not so much ‘end’ as future users can make contributions of their own) and the concept were a success overall. The project continued to grow into the ‘global text project’ which aims to open up more textbooks that are freely available to the user.

I don’t see why the above principles could not be transferred to ELT. While the workload involved in the projects seems considerable for both students and teachers, the obvious attraction of the products they generate lies in the fact that these are affordable, likely to be more relevant to the unique teaching context, flexible (as they allow changes over time) and encourage a high level of interaction between all interested parties.

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