Grant-funded project will produce five books
EAU CLAIRE, Wis. (PRESS RELEASE) – Nursing students from throughout the country will soon be able to save thousands of dollars on textbooks as a result of work led by Chippewa Valley Technical College on open educational resource (OER) Nursing textbooks. The first of what will be five textbooks in the series, Nursing Pharmacology, was published this summer.
“The electronic version became available in June and the first print version just became available Aug. 2,” said CVTC Nursing Instructor Kim Ernstmeyer, the lead author, who has been working exclusively on the project since June 2019.
The project is made possible by a $2.5 million U.S. Department of Education grant involving all 16 Wisconsin Technical College System (WTCS) schools, with CVTC as the lead institution. Gateway, Northeast and Madison Area technical colleges are also working with CVTC in guiding the development of the project. The concept is creating a series of open-source textbooks that students will be able to use without incurring the cost of purchasing books published by private publishers, with the costs often being hundreds of dollars.
In addition, other colleges and universities will be able to adapt the textbooks to their curriculum without concerns about copyright infringement, opening the possibility of the textbook gaining national or even international use.