WASHINGTON, March 12, 2014 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Saylor Academy is pleased to announce the release of Information Systems for Business and Beyond, an openly-licensed, college level textbook. This edition is the first full-length open textbook to be developed by the Academy. The Academy worked with David Bourgeois, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Information Systems and the Director of Innovation at Biola University's Crowell School of Business, to complete the textbook over the course of the past year.
Geared primarily toward undergraduate business students, Information Systems for Business and Beyond includes learning outcomes, study questions with answer keys, and practice exercises. Available for download at the Academy website, the book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY) license and is published in six different formats (including .docx, .epub, .pdf, .html, .mobi, and .xml), allowing students to use the text on a variety of devices and operating systems. Additionally, the Academy will redesign its BUS206: Management Information Systems course to fully incorporate the new text.
Bourgeois and the Academy launched the project in September 2012 after a rigorous peer review process. During development, additional subject matter experts were invited to assess the content on an ongoing basis, resulting in a vetted, high quality textbook.
A longtime advocate of open educational resources (OER), Bourgeois said, "I have been teaching information systems courses for over a decade and was always concerned by the high price of textbooks. For the last few years, I did not even assign an MIS textbook at all, choosing to use my own resources instead. By partnering with Saylor, I am now able to provide my students (and many others) free access to the concepts that are so important to understanding how our world has been impacted by digital technologies."
Open textbooks are seeing increasing use in college classrooms as a way for students to save money and for professors to customize content. According to a 2010 report from the Student Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs), use of open textbooks could help "reduce the average amount spent [on course texts] per year by 80%."* Information Systems for Business and Beyond joins nearly 100 other free-of-cost textbooks maintained on the Academy's online bookshelf.
Bourgeois has already adopted the text for his Management Information Systems (MIS) course at Biola, using a pre-publication version during the Winter 2014 term. Now that the text is officially released, it will be fully adopted at Biola for the nearly 180 students who take the Biola MIS course each year. Bourgeois and Saylor hope that many more instructors and students will adopt the book; the author will maintain a page on Facebook dedicated to using and supporting wide adoption of this new, open text.
*A Cover to Cover Solution: How Open Textbooks are the Path to Textbook Affordability (30 September 2010 | http://www.studentpirgs.org/reports/cover-cover-solution)
A photo accompanying this release is available at:
http://www.globenewswire.com/newsroom/prs/?pkgid=24095
