Adaptable Course Materials: Creating an Open Textbook for Electromagnetics

We describe the purpose, process, and product of developing the open textbook. Electromagnetics, Volume 1 (Beta) by Ellingson (2018) is a faculty-authored, LaTeX based, customizable, and openly licensed textbook (licensed Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike CC BY SA 4.0) published through VT Publishing of the University Libraries and publicly released as a Beta version. This poster explores the potential and process of reusing, developing, and publicly sharing modular and customizable course materials (open textbooks) licensed with Creative Commons licenses in support of addressing faculty desire for more flexible, adaptable, and lower cost course materials. Electromagnetics Volume 1 (Beta) was published in January 2018 by VT Publishing and made possible in part by the Virginia Tech University Libraries’ Open Education Faculty Initiative Grant Program. The text is currently being field tested Spring 2018 ECE 3105 with ancillaries, LaTeX source code, and new print and electronic versions expected to be released in Summer 2018. It is freely and publicly available at: https://doi.org/10.7294/W4WQ01ZM A low-cost print on demand version of Volume 1 BETA is also available via Amazon.com for under $30. This textbook is part of the Open Electromagnetics Project at Virginia Tech. The goal of the project is to create no-cost openly-licensed content for courses in undergraduate engineering electromagnetics. The project is motivated by two things: lowering learning material costs for students and giving faculty the freedom to adopt, modify, and improve their educational resources.