I am sharing here my experience both as an author of open textbooks and with copyrighted books. I authored a book called Essential of Molecular Biology 

https://www.flipkart.com/essentials-molecular-biology/p/itmdbxyhstkywyxw.

The book had a good response; I too had royalty. A lot of students across colleges here in Chennai found it useful, but all were not able to buy.

In the post-COVID time when digital education started to revolutionize the education system, I was slowly exploring online digital education and blended learning. That’s when I came to know about OERs; I did complete the Commonwealth of Learning’s Understanding Open Educational Resources (OER) course. Then I tried to develop open educational resources. Created few H5P interactive exercises, shared with CC License , 

Few of it 

https://h5pcatalogue.in/node/337 

https://h5pcatalogue.in/node/250 

https://h5p.org/user/882634 

(  h5p.org/ and h5pcatalogue.in/ are where we can get interactive contents with CC License )

Then I ventured to develop open textbooks. 

https://pressbooks.justwrite.in/understanding-gene-regulation/  We can find the same in Merlot Library too.

https://www.merlot.org/merlot/viewMaterial.htm?id=773416878 

https://pressbooks.justwrite.in/mitochondrial-inheritance/

 in merlot 

https://www.merlot.org/merlot/viewMaterial.htm?id=773416857 

https://pressbooks.justwrite.in/interactive-biology-secondary/ 

same In OER Commons

https://oercommons.org/courses/interactive-biology-textbook-for-secondary-school-students 

 

Sharing is caring. As academicians, if we can share our content, be it a book or a course, it would benefit the students a lot. As pointed out before, not everyone can afford education, in which case open educational resources such as texts, books, videos, and pictures have made learning much easier ,more interesting and affordable. 

When I was working on open textbooks, I found Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/ a real treasure trove of the images that I could use freely, of course, with a Creative Commons license. When textbooks are made as interactive open e-books, a lot of students enjoy them, as the images are interactive; beneath a text, they could see relevant videos. I did try to add interactive simulations from PhET Interactive Simulations https://phet.colorado.edu/ .

 I felt the similar molecular biology content from my Pearson publication became more learner-engaging and reachable. I could just simply add the links of my open books to any LMS (I use Google Classroom), and my students could easily access it. 

With open educational resources and open practices, we can serve the student/learning community better.

I also attach feedback forms at the end of all the open books developed so that if any changes or refinements are needed, that could be done. 

I have not done any instructional design course, but with my teaching experience, I am trying to learn to make teaching/learning more engaging and interesting.

All my books I shared with a CC-BY-SA license.