As part of the BCcampus institutional grant, we secured matching funds to offer grants of up to $8500 CAD for projects which helped achieve Zero Textbook Cost. $33,500 in grants were awarded in total. You can read more about the other recipients on our blog.

What’s your name and position? What school(s) do you work for?

We’re Shauna Begley and Tanner Brine, both Faculty & Program Heads in Operations Management at BCIT’s School of Business + Media. Between us, we cover a range of courses focused on data systems, analytics, and business technology.

Why did you decide to pursue a Zero Textbook Cost approach?

The gap was already there. Two of our courses, BSYS 2000 and BSYS 3205, had no textbook at all, just faculty-created materials. That’s not a sustainable or equitable situation for students. For BABI 7800, students were paying out of pocket for a commercial textbook. A ZTC approach made sense because it lets us formalize and improve what we were already building informally, while working toward eliminating a cost for students.

In a nutshell, could you describe your project?

We’re developing an openly-licensed digital textbook called Applied Business Data Modelling Fundamentals. It covers core topics like business data concepts, entity-relationship modelling, normalization, data transformation, and data governance, all grounded in practical, applied business contexts. It’s designed to serve multiple courses at different levels, from introductory to graduate.

How will the deliverable(s) from your project contribute to Zero Textbook Cost learning at BCIT?

Once published, the textbook will be freely available to any BCIT student in the courses it supports, no purchase required. For BSYS 2000 and BSYS 3205, it fills a gap where no resource existed before. For BABI 7800, it lays the foundational groundwork that will eventually allow us to move away from a paid commercial textbook as the resource grows. It will also be deposited in the BCIT Institutional Repository under an open license, so other instructors can adopt or adapt it down the road.

What advice would you give to a BCIT instructor considering adopting ZTC?

Start by looking at what you’re already creating. Most of us have slides, notes, and assignments that essentially function as a course resource. ZTC is an opportunity to pull that together into something students can actually use and keep. One of the best things we did was loop in the instructors who actually teach these courses day to day. They know what students struggle with, what’s missing, and what already works well. Collaborating with them from the start means the final resource is more useful for everyone, and it spreads the workload so no single person is carrying the whole thing. It doesn’t have to be a solo project.

What impact do you hope your ZTC project will have on BCIT students?

Right now, students in these courses are working with a patchwork of faculty-created materials that vary depending on who’s teaching the course. We want to change that. A shared, well-structured textbook means every student gets the same quality foundation regardless of their section or instructor. It also gives the material a level of professionalism and coherence that’s hard to achieve with scattered resources. Over time, as the textbook grows, the cost benefits will follow. But the first win is really about giving students something they can rely on.