Thanks to Our Friends of Flat World

We like to call the instructors who adopt our open textbooks "Friends of Flat World." The moniker works for a whole bunch of reasons; friends stand by you, they believe in you, they help you work through the stuff that isn't perfect about you, and appreciate you for those special things you bring to the relationship.

We've found that "Friends of Flat World" are particularly concerned with their students, and delivering content that suits their specific needs at a price that suits their budgets. We have that in common. So, the eve of Thanksgiving is an appropriate time to say, "Thank you, Friends."

Below you will see two posts about Flat World from two of our "Friends." They've commented on how the "open" nature of Flat World's books has made a positive impact on their students and their classroom.

If you believe in openly licensed materials, are considering authoring an open textbook, or adopting open materials for your course, please comment on your experiences so we can all learn from each other's best practices.

Sally Dixon - Skagit
About a year ago I started exploring the idea of using free open source materials in my classes as the main resource for students. I was led to this concept by the increasingly high costs of traditional textbooks.

Students were indicating that they were taking my class but simply couldn't afford the textbook so they would try their best to make do. As all instructors know one of the difficulties of building a class around original or open source materials is the time consuming tasks of developing coherence among different resources and then building all of the assignments and assessments from scratch.

I don't actually remember how I came across Flatworld but I soon realized that it was exactly what I was looking for. I found that Flatworld offered a "traditional" e-textbook for free plus it included instructor resources.

I am using the Flatworld textbook Exploring Business by Karen Collins this quarter. The book is excellent and the instructor materials are terrific. I would venture to say that the instructor materials provided with the online textbook are among the best materials I have ever received from any publisher.

My students are also happy with the book. Since they had a choice about what they wanted and could pay for the book, they exercised their options. Some of them have purchased the textbook or the various add-ons, and some of them use the online text only. Anecdotally, I believe that the $1.99 per chapter purchase is becoming popular in my class!

Eric Malm - Cabrini
Who could ask for a better tool to teach students about "open source
software", "user generated content" and "web 2.0 technologies" than a
FlatWorldKnowledge text book! Students can see first-hand the ability
for an instructor to customize the text, making it just right for a
specific course and student population. And the ability to choose
between free online content, and reasonably priced paper editions
illustrates how technology is turning the text book industry on it's
head. Knowing that I won't need to switch edition every year or two
means that my time-investment in customizing the content will pay off
over many semesters. I've adopted Flatworld texts for both MIS and
Economics, and have successfully brought the test banks and support
materials into my LMS. The books are well-written 'as is', but the
ability to customize the texts will allow me to 'fine tune' them each
semester.