College Open Textbooks BLOG
Driving Awareness and Adoption
Advanced Water Mathematics Online Textbook – an update from an adopter community grantee
Regina Blasberg, College of Canyons
Mike Alvord, Director of Operations for Newhall County Water District, and I are working on writing an Advanced Water Mathematics online textbook. Mike has basically completed the first draft of the textbook which is already in use in our Water 031 Advanced Water Mathematics course. I have been focused on completing edits and identifying any inconsistencies in formatting. Since the text is currently being used, we have found that the students are enjoying providing comments, pointing out errors, and indicating topics that aren’t clearly explained as well. Once this draft is final and we’ve received additional student feedback, we’ll add more homework problems, figures, and any other final updates.
What’s New in OER at Scottsdale Community College?
Faculty in the Mathematics Department at Scottsdale Community College have been working hard this year to create, revise, and organize materials for our OER project in several of our courses. This is exciting for all of us!
Our goal is to offer all of our MAT 09x Introductory Algebra, MAT 12x Intermediate Algebra, and MAT 150 College Algebra courses using OER materials starting this Fall 2012. During the 2011-2012 academic year, we have pilot tested our materials, formed a learning community of very talented mathematics faculty, and collaborated with each other to further refine the OER textbook, student support materials, and online homework assignments. This summer, several faculty (Bill Meacham, Judy Sutor, Jenifer Bohart, Donna Guhse, and Linda Knop) will be working hard to take what we have learned from our spring pilot and, once again, refine these materials. The exciting part of the refinement process is that we have complete control over the quality of what we adopt to support our classes! We love this!
Recently, our OER team received the SCC Innovation of the Year Award. Only 1 team per college in the Maricopa Community College District receives this award. As a result, we were invited to give a presentation in hopes of receiving the widely sought-after District Innovation of the Year Award. The presentation slides are available at: OER Innovation of the Year. Wish us luck that we are awarded our District IOTY Award very soon!
As part of our OER project, our learning community has restructured the course so that we provide meaningful support for students, both inside and outside of the classroom. 
Before class, students can complete a “mini-lesson” to help prepare them for the next class session. During class, they receive instruction and engage in paired board work. After class, they use iMathAS and problem solving activities to support their learning. The next class session then allows for more active learning and engagement with the mathematics. Outside of the classroom, students’ learning is supported by the OER textbook and video tutorials created by MathIsPower4U’s James Sousa, as well as the Khan Academy.
Students have been appreciative of our efforts to use free (or nearly free!) materials for their mathematics courses. In fact, feel free to watch a couple of student testimonials about their experience in an OER math class. It’s exciting to hear that they are using technology — their smartphone, their tablet, etc. — to complete online homework and to access the textbook.
It’s a wonderful time to be teaching college mathematics!
Exemplary open textbooks and methodology: ChemWiki and its Progeny
ChemWiki not only shines as an exemplary series of open-licensed chemistry textbooks, it has spawned
Professor Delmar Larsen of the University of California at Davis heads the ChemWiki project, a series of online textbooks including Analytical, Biological, Inorganic, Organic, Physical, and Theoretical Chemistry plus the History of Chemistry and Lab Techniques. All are licensed Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike. Students and instructors contribute to the textbooks that are constantly improved.
ChemWiki includes more than 6,000 pages with high-quality illustrations. Individual pages in ChemWiki can be printed or turned into Adobe PDF files. Contributors include more than 30 chemistry professors and students as well as web technologists and publicist Richard Osibanjo.
ChemWiki provides maps to popular commercial general, organic, and physical textbooks.
Here are the pages showing how other colleges and universities are starting to incorporate the UC Davis ChemWiki into their courses:
- Columbia University
- Contra Costa College
- Diablo Valley College
- Hope College
- J. Sargent Reynolds Community College
- New Mexico State University Alamogodro
- University of Minnesota at Morris
- Truman State University
College Open Textbook grantee communities include two based on the UC Davis series:
- 3-D Molecular Models in ChemWiki: Dr. Ron Rusay and colleagues at Diablo Valley Community College
- PhysWiki Dynamic Textbook project: Professor Erik Christensen at South Florida Community College and a colleague at Monroe Community College, NY. Erik was named a College Open Textbooks Outstanding Open Textbooks Advocate/Trainer in 2010.
A special feature of the UC Davis wiki texts is the Student Ability Rating and Inquiry System (SARIS) , a tool for tracking student progress based on PracticeZone.
PracticeZone is part of the ChemVantage academic program learning and assessment program for General Chemistry that includes jargon used in mastering video games. Chuck Wight of the University of Utah founded ChemVantage. “We have configured the software to allow students to submit proposed solutions to the problems as often as they want, in order to improve their scores. The objective is for students to use the feedback to correct their errors prior to the deadline for the assignment.” ChemVantage carries a Creative Commons Attribution license.
College Open Textbooks delights in publicizing the wiki texts from UC Davis, the use of these by several institutions, and the exciting approach to chemistry education from the University of Utah.
Mentor Cloud and Open Doors Group / College Open Textbooks Partner to Facilitate Sharing Best Practices
Mentor Cloud and Open Doors Group / College Open Textbooks Partner to
Facilitate Sharing Best Practices Among the Open Education Community
New Community to Share Best Practices and Facilitate Mentoring in Open Education 
Cupertino, CA, January 26, 2012 — In honor of National Mentoring Day, Mentor Cloud and Open Doors Group/College Open Textbooks announced today the availability of an education community that allows 24×7 discussion threads and broadcast email messages to all members by all members. Generally all members will be both mentors and mentees in keeping with 21st century models of learning communities.
Education in the 21st Century faces an enormous challenge:
- Peace, prosperity, and longevity require that a much larger share of the 8 billion global inhabitants have access to affordable quality education, and
- Current education processes cannot scale enough to meet this challenge; in particular it is impossible to train enough instructors.
Education in the 21st Century is afforded three important opportunities to meet the above challenge:
- Telecommunications and computing technologies radically lower the cost of educational materials.
- Discoveries in pedagogy in the past century show that cooperative and developmental learning are far more effective than traditional methods.
- New business models including openly-licensed content and tools can remove barriers and create sustainable affordable learning.
Collaboration tools are needed in at least three areas of open education:
- Sharing of best practices: We cannot afford to reinvent processes in every institution, state/province, or country.
- Mentor/mentee relationships in careers and to make instructorless open courseware educationally sound. Open Courseware Consortium and Saylor Foundation have large numbers of open-licensed instructorless courses.
- Mentor/mentee tools to help create and facilitate relationships in the expanding Open Educational Resources (OER) movement.
OpenDoorsGroup.MentorCloud.com, powered by Mentor Cloud, is the tool that allows for all three of the above. 
During the beta period, OpenDoorsGroup.MentorCloud.com will be free of cost to individuals who are thought leaders and contributors in open education. Invitations will be sent starting in early February. There may be a fee for organizations that sign up 5 or more individuals as well as organizations looking to tap into the open education community. There will also be a fee for organizations that are looking for facilitators to drive conversations on certain topics and areas.
“There is absolutely a need for a central place for those in the open education community to share best practices” says Mitchell Levy, Co-Director, College Open Textbooks, who emphasizes that Mentor Cloud is a great tool to provide this level of service.
Contact Ravishankar Gundlapalli, Mentor Cloud, ravi@mentorcloud.com 650-520-3052 or Sharyn Fitzpatrick, Open Doors Group/College Open Textbooks, sharyn.fitzpatrick@happyabout.info 650-814-5835
Winning Ideas from the Big Ideas Fest
Both Jacky Hood and I along with 150 other leading educators and business executives focused on education convened in Half Moon Bay on December 4-7 for the Big Ideas Fest (http://bigideasfest.org/2011-big-ideas-fest/2011-big-ideas-fest). In addition to listening to 18 speakers (http://bigideasfest.org/2011-big-ideas-fest/2011-speakers-big-ideas-fest) ranging from Martha Kanter, Under Secretary, US Department of Education, to Kaycee Eckhardt, an amazingly giving and passionate Reading Teacher from New Orleans Charter Science and Math Academy, we ate good food, networked, and worked on some big ideas.
Part of the conference was the facilitation of Action Collabs (http://bigideasfest.org/2011-big-ideas-fest/2011-action-collabs-big-ideas-fest, a great way to brainstorm solutions to core questions. There were nine groups of 15-20 people led by facilitators through the multi-day brain-storming process. Open Educational Resources (OER) were the major focus. Four of the nine groups took on the following question: “How might we leverage open (content, data, and research) to transform teaching and learning?” The groups all followed a six step process: 1) Identify the Opportunity, 2) Design the Solution, 3) Prototype the Solution, 4) Present and get Expert Feedback, 5) Update the Solution based on the feedback and Design if to Scale and Spread, and 6) Present it again. Step 1 included interviewing experts. Former COT director and now Open Courseware Consortium/CCCOER community college outreach manager, Una Daly, was one of the experts. The process was engaging and produced very interesting results. It was fun to see the solutions that 150 bright minds can produce. Strong synergy emerged among educators, business people, foundation managers, and others. The four different groups focused on the same question approached their solutions in very different ways.
Other Action Collab Topics included Assessments and Basic Literacy/Math Skills.
ISKME secured a $50k grant from the Gates Foundation to take the three most promising “big ideas” to the next level. It is a matching grant and ISKME is looking to find another $50k to match the Gates funding, which means that $100k will be used to bring 3 of the 9 ideas presented to the next level. Everyone in the Action Collab I participated in (aka WeLearn) were elated when our idea was paired with another group as one of the winners. WeLearn emphasized vocational life-long learning. Putting tools and knowledge in the hands of those in the workforce to help them learn and grow. In addition to OER and traditional content, we had focused on mentor/mentee matching and close ties to corporations as one of the benefactors of a more skill-based workforce.
This big idea is similar to a concept that the Open Doors Group has been discussing; it is called CHAI (Commerce, Healthcare, Agriculture and Industry) as a potential sharing space for flexible, affordable education/training materials. This is a much larger initiative with a focus on vocational education initiatives utilizing open resources. Very exciting idea that has synergy with the big ideas that surfaced at the Big Ideas Fest. Stay tuned for more ideas.
Mitchell Levy, Co-Director, College Open Textbooks
- 408-257-3000, http://collegeopentextbooks.org
CEO & Author, Happy About
- http://happyabout.com, http://42rules.com, http://thinkaha.com
Related posting: Read move about the Big Ideas Fest from Carol Hedgspeth’s blog post: http://www.collegeopentextbooks.org/blog/?p=1845
NOTE: IMAGES ARE CC-BY-SA BY ISKME.
Education Champions Work Together to Find Solutions for Open Education Design Challenge at Big Ideas Fest 2011
By Carol Hedgspeth, Senior Research Associate, ISKME
ISKME’s 3rd annual Big Ideas Fest (www.bigideasfest.org) was held in early December in Half Moon Bay, CA, and as promised, creative doers and thinkers from diverse levels of education gathered to learn from and share with each other. This convening yielded creative, inspirational, and often revolutionary ideas about current educational challenges, while providing the opportunity to interact and engage with a mix of teachers, researchers, administrators, entrepreneurs, education leaders. Central to Big Ideas Fest is the “action” component, called Action Collabs–design-oriented labs where participants brainstormed, prototyped, and ultimately create scalable solutions to major education challenges, such as achieving universal literacy and math competency, and leveraging open education to transform teaching 
and learning.
In a major shift from traditional educational conferences, the event is designed to bring together kindred spirits on a level playing field, where a person’s work or role becomes less important than how they share and collaborate within their group. In this way, the mix of students, teachers, administrators, researchers, inventors, and executives operate as peers in solving a common problem. These common problems are referred to as “design challenges” at the Big Ideas Fest.
One of the design challenges that was taken on by the Action Collabs was to create solutions around leveraging open content, data, and research to transform teaching and learning. During the Action Collabs, teachers, administrators, and students worked alongside noted leaders and policy makers in the field of open education. The Action Collab process facilitates moving from brainstorming ideas to creating tangible manifestations of those ideas (using pipe cleaners, popsicle sticks and other craft items), in a rapid low-investment way, and results in a visual representation of a solution that helps to see the idea in the real world.
Many of the Big Ideas Fest’s rapid-fire speakers were full participants in the Action Collabs as well. Speakers on open education included Brewster Kahle, Founder of the Internet Archive; Martha Kanter, the U.S. Under Secretary of Education; Neeru Kholsa, Co-Founder of CK-12 Foundation and pioneer in the OER movement; and Barbara Chow, Education Program Director at Hewlett and champion of open education resources. Additional speakers included Jody Lewen, the Executive Director of the Prison University Project; Kaycee Eckhardt, an award-winning charter school teacher whose science and math academy is housed in a FEMA trailer in the 9th ward of New Orleans; and Adora Svitak, the 13-year old recipient of NEA Foundation’s Award for Outstanding Service to Public Education.
THE ACTION COLLAB
The Action Collab groups that were focused on “open” provided innovative and inspired prototype solutions to the question “How might we leverage open (content, research, data) to transform teaching and learning?” One solution, “Pandora for Learning”, was designed to connect students to content that students are passionate about and that they have curated. A second solution to the open education design challenge focused on creating a virtual learning experience that is learner- and teacher-curated, linking the end user to open content about the arts.
ISKME is committed to support the further development of these and other design solutions on the soon-to-launch online Action Collab Network.
MyOpenMath.com, a free and open online homework system for mathematics, now available online!
In the last several years, we’ve seen the release of many excellent open textbooks, yet adoption still remains a challenge. From my perspective as a math instructor, I see two major barriers: discovery and ancillaries.
The first challenge for adoption of open textbooks is an instructor finding one. There are many instructors who are not even aware that open textbooks exist. Second, if an instructor is interested in open textbooks, even the reasonably well-culled listing at collegeopentextbooks.org can be daunting, and very few listed books resemble complete, ready-to-adopt textbooks. For a busy instructor, the prospect of having to remix resources from multiple sources is often more effort than they’re willing to put in.
To start addressing the second part of the discovery challenge, I built OpenTextBookStore.com. This site lists a subset of open textbooks I felt are really ready-to-adopt without requiring remixing or supplementing, and that are available in printed form. I’ve started with math books, but I hope to expand the listing with recommendations from subject matter experts in other fields. The site recreates the experience of browsing a publisher’s website; each listing shows a summary of the book, license information, the available formats, a table of contents, and a list of any available ancillaries.
David Lippman
Instructors have become accustomed to publishers providing extensive ancillary materials for textbooks, providing the second challenge for adoption of open textbooks. Many excellent efforts are contributing to addressing the ancillary challenge, including open courseware efforts like the Washington Open Course Library (which I was part of). In mathematics, online homework has become commonplace, and for a majority of faculty is a key part of their textbook adoption decision.
To help address this, I’m happy to announce MyOpenMath.com, a free and open online homework system for mathematics. It is built on open-source software I’ve been developing for six years, and that has been used by tens of thousands of students. It provides randomized, algorithmically generated homework with automated grading of numerical and algebraic answers, similar to WebAssign and other publisher products. It also provides a course management system with gradebook, file posting, discussion forums, etc. (To their credit, WebAssign has produced online homework for several open textbooks, but this comes with a cost to students and is not open.) MyOpenMath has homework aligned with open textbooks in pre-algebra, beginning and intermediate algebra, pre-calculus, and trigonometry. The courses can easily be copied and modified by an instructor and used with students as graded homework. Many courses include video lessons, classroom activities, or other supplements as well. These courses are also available to students for self-study, review purposes, or as ungraded practice. These courses were contributed by faculty in Washington and Arizona; please see our “About us” page for credits.
Increased adoptions of open textbooks will only come by making it easy for faculty to find open textbooks, having open textbooks that can easily replace traditional textbooks, and providing ancillaries that instructors rely on. I hope OpenTextBookStore.com and MyOpenMath.com can contribute to that effort.
–David Lippman
Don't Miss ISKME's Big Idea Fest! Register Today!
The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (www.iskme.org) is hosting its annual Big Ideas Fest in December 2011 in Half Moon Bay, CA. This three-day gathering of the nation’s most creative makers and doers in education brings together champions across K-12, higher education, and informal learning, to participate in a truly unique interactive experience.
This is the one place each year where education change agents find each other at what one participant describes as “like TED on Steroids!” You’llhear from inspiring speakers.
Take part in Action Collabs.designed to incubate solutions to address education’s most pressing challenges. If you are looking for an opportunity to be recharged with new perspectives and learn how to use collaborative tools to prototype innovative ideas, add yourself to the list of those who have the desire and passion necessary to break down silos and call for real change in education.
Register today and use the invitation code = bif3022
Global Open Access Project Launch – Don't miss it live!
Open Access Logo
Ms. Irina Bokova, Director General of UNESCO will be officiating the launch of “Global Open Access Platform” (usually called the Global Open Access Portal) along with the launch of the UNESCO OER Platform, the re-designed Open Training Platform, and the OER policy Guidelines. The Launch is scheduled for November 1, 2011 at 6:30pm Paris time (GMT-1) and 10:30 am PDT and will be live-streamed in:
English – mms://stream.unesco.org/live/room_10_en.wmv
Français – mms://stream.unesco.org/live/room_10_fr.wmv
http://www.wsis-community.org/pg/event_calendar/view/423737
Connexions Conference 2011 (Part 3)
Part 3
Connexions has expanded its partnerships to several organizations. I will highlight some of them. Representatives from the following organizations demonstrated, presented and/or discussed their organizations: VOER (The Vietnam Foundation for OER: http://voer.edu.vn ), Upfront Systems in South Africa (there was an excellent demo of http://mobile.cnx.org and a demo showing MathMl and text on cell phones using just a mobile browser, i.e., not needing an iPhone or an Android), WebAssign (http://webassign.net – an excellent homework and grading system for the sciences and mathematics which I personally admire and use with Collaborative Statistics), Shutterfly in South Africa (all content in the K-12 curriculum is available via mobile cell phones, again, not needing a smart phone), Jesuit Virtual Learning Academy (resource for network for the Jesuit 53 secondary schools in US and more than 400 secondary schools worldwide which encourages the development, use, and sharing of educational resources ), UniqU (a spin-off from Connexions that helps folks use Connexions http://theuniqu.com ), Words & Numbers (a publisher that has developed open textbooks for Connextions and other organizations), AKADEMOS (provides an information and commerce platform that serves a single site for gathering all learning materials used in educational environments http://akademos.com). Bridgeport Education (the parent company of Ashford University and University of the Rockies), Full Marks (a South African nonprofit assessment bank that is completely open source; people can add your own questions, score sheets, etc.), and NOTA (OER for K-12).
Dr. Joel Thierstein, Executive Director – Connexions
I will finish up this blog with a few comments from Joel Thierstein. Joel proudly proclaimed that OER is transitioning from a “movement” to “mainstream” as we transition into K-12 market. He announced that in the last two months, Connexions received a grant from a consortium of grantors. It is going to produce publisher quality content initially targeted at community colleges. Phase I is 18 months long and will result in the production of 5 textbooks (Anatomy &Physiology, Sociology, Biology, Biology for non-majors, and Physics). Phase II will also be 18 months long and will produce 15 additional books). The major expense is expected to be clearing the copyright of images. Once that happens, the images will be available freely to all. The goal of funders to increase quality of education. The money folks used to spend on textbooks will now be available to spend on new and innovative ways to do content. “If we succeed in this, it will change education forever,” according to Joel.
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