Milestone on the Trek to Zero Textbook Costs in LESD – New Intro to Criminology Textbook

In Summer 2015, CTLI partnered with the Law Enforcement Studies Diploma (LESD) program to create a zero textbook cost (ZTC) diploma pathway for students. We wanted to create a learning environment where students and faculty could freely access, retain and adapt learning materials rather than rely on traditional commercial textbooks.

At that time, we had a handful of courses that were using open textbooks (including three created by JIBC faculty – Writing for Success, Ethics in Law Enforcement, and Intro to Criminal Investigation) and the cost of textbooks for students for their two-year program was about $1300.

In 2017, CTLI applied for a grant from BCcampus that allowed us to continue on that journey and develop three more resources  – Critical Reading & Writing, Research Methods and Law Enforcement Communications.

When we submitted that grant, one of the difficult challenges that we could foresee in developing the ZTC pathway was the development of an Intro to Criminology textbook.

Today, we are pleased to announce that Kwantlen Polytechnic University has developed the open textbook for Intro to Criminology and that this book has been adopted by the JIBC LESD program. JIBC helped to fund and support the development of ancillaries for this resource and therefore, faculty adopting this book have access to test banks and PowerPoints for each chapter.

This textbook was designed to be flexible and adaptable to meet the needs of a first-year criminology course. Although, each chapter is deep enough to be useful as a supplement for subject-area courses. The authors use plain and accessible language as much as possible, but introduce more advanced, technical concepts where appropriate.

While the text gives due attention to the historical “canon” of mainstream criminological thought, it also challenges many of these ideas by exploring alternative, critical, and marginalized perspectives. This textbook contains Indigenous perspectives throughout thanks to Leah Ballantyne, LLB LLM, a Cree lawyer from the Mathias Colomb Cree Nation in Pukatawagan, Manitoba, who provided expert Indigenous consultation/editing for this textbook.

In 2017, students had textbook costs of about $1300 for their two year program.

We are proud to share that through our efforts, the cost today has dropped to around $300.

We are committed to continuing the work towards making that number $0.

If you are interested in helping with these efforts – please reach out to ctli@jibc.ca.