2026 Champion: Hayashibara, Shigeo

Biography

Dr. Shigeo Hayashibara has served at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s Prescott Campus for the past 25 years, where his work focuses on aerodynamics, aircraft flight mechanics, computational fluid dynamics, and thermal–fluid sciences. Since 2003, he has not required a traditional textbook for his courses and, beginning in 2024, started developing an engineering workbook series through Pressbooks Open Textbooks.

Comments

Nomination Comments:

"Dr. Hayashibara, since 2003, has NEVER used any textbook in his engineering classes. He always provided originally developed lecture notes for teaching for over 20 years. Students enjoyed, not only saving textbook costs, but also learning from instructor's originally developed engineering learning materials with problem solution hands-on practices. In 2025, under the Pressbooks (Eagle Pubs) open textbook initiative, Dr.Hayashibara published his first "Engineering Workbook Series" open textbook: Computer Simulations of Aerodynamics (https://eaglepubs.erau.edu/compsimforaero/). Staring new from 2026, Dr. Hayashibara is planning to further advance this "Engineering Workbook Series" open textbook publications in the area of fluid mechanics and thermodynamics. This may impact bulk majority of sophomore junior engineering major students in the near future."

"He has his classes print lecture notes, homework, and any other needed materials so you do not need to spend any money on materials in his class. His coursework and materials are made by himself."

"Does not require text books and provides notes and HW freely to his students who already pay a large sum for the class. This is how it should be in college where we already pay multiple thousands of dollars for class before having to pay another thousand dollars on textbooks per semester, take note."

"Not only does Dr. Hayashibara not require a textbook for his course, he fully provides a textbook-length set of well formatted, professional lecture notes which are equal if not higher in quality than many textbooks I have had in the past. He could easily have charged students to use this resource, but provides it directly as part of the course."

"This is instructor has a free textbook as they have made their own for the class. This enables his students to be able to immediately and freely find any information they need as we can easily obtain all of the information for the course. An example is when it comes to finding examples of problems, because they are in the textbook that can be found in canvas or on paper it's extremely easy to find the needed materials."

"No textbook needed, gives us all the information free to download."

"He makes his own detailed notes and does not require a textbook for ANY of his classes. His notes and lectures are very well made and interactive."

"really good notes and no use of textbook"

"I dont need a textbook for his class and he has his own notes which are really good and well written."

"No textbook for his classes."

"Dr. H makes his course materials extremely accessible. He doesn’t have a required textbook that we have to purchase, and provides all of his detailed fill-in-the-blank notes on Canvas for us to print out. Additionally his homeworks are paper as well, so we don’t have to pay another website to complete our homework."

"His lecture material is completely free and covers the entirety of the course content in very practical detail. Along with that he also just teaches the material great, makes it easy to understand"

"This professor provides very in-depth lecture notes curated from scratch. They are really good at getting you to understand not just the content but where the content originates from."

"Professor H goes above and beyond when it comes to lecture notes and textbook material. For every class, we have prepared notes and lecture material that is straight from the textbook. He gives us the examples and goes through how to do them properly."